


The Meadowlark, Flown!

by antistar_e (kaikamahine)



Category: Social Network (2010)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Wings, Gen, Wingfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-06
Updated: 2012-12-06
Packaged: 2017-11-20 10:51:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 24,412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/584590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaikamahine/pseuds/antistar_e
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Christy is twelve years old and her shoulders won't stop itching. [AU, wingfic.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Meadowlark, Flown!

**Author's Note:**

> Completely self-indulgent wingfic for Moog! This AU is based loosely off Laurel Winter's [Growing Wings](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/642327.Growing_Wings), and contains a very blatant crossover with Iron Giant. You're welcome.
> 
> Also, everybody in this fic is under the legal age of consent, so any and all burgeoning relationships are background at best. Just fyi.
> 
> Can be read here or [@ LJ.](http://veritasrecords.livejournal.com/115614.html)

-

 

 

Jake's behavior starts going downhill the first week of November. Adrienne thinks it's seasonal and that he'll get over it as soon as he realizes that his outbursts don't make things better for him, but until then, everyone's expected to pitch in.

Christy is the smallest kid in her grade and weighs all of seventy-five pounds (she almost tips the scale at eighty when her hair's wet, thank you very much,) so she isn't much of a help when he really gets going and needs to be held down before he hurts himself; she leaves that to Adrienne and Big Spud.

Instead, she scours the house every day before she leaves for school and every day when she comes back, looking for candy bars or honey or starchy snacks that Jake might have squirreled away. He's diabetic, and it's really bad, but he doesn't understand or else just refuses to listen, so he'll smuggle Kit Kats and packages of animal crackers to eat under his bedcovers. Christy hates the way he screws up his face and yells whenever he sees that she emptied one of his stashes, but she hates watching Adrienne give him an insulin shot even more. Needles are frightening.

It's right after Halloween and there's candy _everywhere._ Nobody _means_ to endanger Jake like that, but Christy's extra careful anyway, pulling a chair over so she can pat down the top of the fridge and checking the bottom of Jake's special cereal boxes, which no one else touches. She shakes out all of his clothes and runs her fingers along the edges of his pillowcase, and then Adrienne pokes her head around the door.

"Are you ready?" she asks. Adrienne's shaped like a whale and always wears XXL Wolf Moon shirts from the kiosk in the mall and never seems to get cold. Christy's lived with her for three years now. "The bus will be here soon."

She straightens. "Yes," she says, and hands over her spoils; a half-melted caramel green-apple sucker and two fun-sized Twix.

Individually, they're not enough to send Jake crashing, but together ... 

Adrienne gives her a grateful look. Christy's so pleased with herself that she challenges Big Spud and Taj to race all the way to the bus stop. Big Spud complains, but Taj's too young to figure out that Christy will _always_ win a race; Ms. Kwaniski, the middle school gym teacher, says her bones must be made of air or something.

The point is, it's a bad week for Jake, and that keeps everyone really busy because Jake's always going to need special care, so when Christy starts scratching, nobody notices.

 

-

 

Her shoulders itch. 

They won't _stop_ itching.

It's not even the general dry-skin itch that people always say they get when the seasons change. She itches in two very specific places; symmetric points right along the edge of her shoulder blades, up there in the middle of her back. It's just on that side of hard to get to that leaves her arms aching when she twists them back.

They're going over the homework at the beginning of Social Studies, so Christy tunes them out and crooks her elbow, exploring underneath her sweatshirt.

The sweatshirt is one of the few things Christy's kept from before; it's grey and has a large green frog on the front, wearing sunglasses and throwing up a peace sign. It's from a place in Florida that Christy couldn't find on a map until she thought to check the islands in Key West. The elastic in the wrists have completely given out. She thinks it might have been her dad's.

There are two lumps on her back. They're noticeably raised, like mosquito bites, and flaky.

She digs her fingernails into one as soon as she finds it, feeling twin points of both pain and relief. She scratches until it hurts, and then switches to the other one. 

They're probably spider bites, she figures.

She shakes out her sheets when she gets home, once she's done turning the house upside down looking for candy. Then, because she can, she washes them for good measure. What if it's, like, bed bugs or something? The girl with the iPhone in her homeroom has Google News as her homepage (Christy wants a phone so bad; not even, like, an iPhone, but just one of those simple ones that does texting, she's not picky, but Adrienne won't buy her one) and she told them that there's an outbreak of them in Chicago -- what if they've migrated here?

She doesn't find spiders or bedbugs, and next week, the lumps have only grown larger. They still itch.

She puts lotion on them. When that doesn't work, she steals Big Spud's eczema cream, applying it furtively while he's downstairs helping Adrienne with groceries. 

Big Spud's real name is Amed. He's almost eighteen, but he's been Big Spud as long as Christy's known him; he's the same color and shape of a potato, and he says he gets fewer weird looks being called "Spud" than he does "Amed." He prays five times a day, in his room when he's home and using a special mat when he's at school, and when Christy and Taj were younger, they used to join him because it was fun, but they don't anymore. 

He still has a bio mom, and she comes around sometimes. They sit in the kitchen where everybody can see them. She's tweaky. Christy doesn't like her at all.

The eczema cream helps, it helps a lot, but it's also expensive and Big Spud needs it more than she does, so she tries not to steal it too often.

She takes baths sprinkled with oatmeal, arms wrapped around herself in a weird hug underwater so she can run her fingers up and down the lumps. There's no way they're bug bites. Christy touched a pregnant woman's belly once, right before her baby came out. This feels a lot like that; the skin over the lumps is tight, hard, like it's being stretched super thin.

She desperately wants to ask Adrienne. She doesn't even need answers, not really. She just wants to be held and told that it's okay. 

Maybe it's normal and she's never heard of it before?

Maybe it's some big growing-up secret, like menstruation or something.

But it's a bad time for Jake. One night, after one too many unsuccessful communication attempts, he just screams and overturns the kitchen table. He's never done that before, even at his worst. A lot of the dishware breaks, and it takes an hour and a half to clean up the mess. Afterwards, rocking Jake in her arms until he exhausts himself, Adrienne looks so sad and tired that Christy can't bring herself to say a thing.

 

-

 

Another week later, and Christy thinks she's going to die.

 _Everything_ aches, every muscle and bone she possesses. Part of it is all the strange shapes she contorts herself in, trying to scratch and not to scratch, but part of it is deeper than that. One of the monitors at recess notices Christy huddled at one end of the blacktop, unable to even make herself get up and play and trying not to rub her shoulders against the brick wall. Peeling her gloves off, the monitor fishes a Tootsie Pop out of her coat pocket, saying, "growing pains, huh?" Christy hopes that's it; she's got the basics of puberty down, but she's pretty sure she's supposed to grow lumps on her _chest,_ not on her back. 

She scratches even in her sleep, and wakes up with blood under her fingernails. She paints them black so no one will notice.

Fortunately for her, November is Health month -- instead of going to gym first period like they normally do, they're segregated by gender to either side of the auditorium and taught about their bodies. It's a lot of weird sex stuff, which Christy thinks is boring and a lot gross, but she's grateful, too, because there might have been awkward questions in the locker room if anyone had seen her back.

"You better go away by December," she mutters, and scratches hard at the back of her hands to distract herself from where it really itches.

Carrying a backpack these days hurts too much, so she switches it out for an olive green messenger bag that's too big for her and bangs against her knees when she walks. The itch is a constant awareness that she can't stop.

The first snow of the year comes that Thursday. The leaves haven't all fallen off the trees yet, and snow pillows on top, making the world look as fluffy white and puffy as a marshmallow. It all melts before afternoon classes, but a few of the boys in her grade catch her stuffing snow down her shirt, hoping it would numb the itch, and taunt her for the rest of the day, up until Big Spud looms up behind them at the bus stop and they all scatter.

"You okay?" he asks her when they're on the bus. His friends whoop and shout his name from the back where all the high schoolers sit, talking about sledding, man, c'mon, it's prime time, but he sits next to her in the middle school section and watches her calmly. Her clothes are damp and she's still shivering.

"Growing pains," she answers.

He nods, and offers her an earbud from his mp3 player. They listen to The Decemberists the whole way home.

 

-

 

She wakes up in the middle of the night to find her arms wrapped all the way around herself, her nails digging deep gouges in her skin. She groans and rolls over, but now that she's thinking about it, she can't think about anything else.

She slips out of bed, hissing when her bare legs hit the cold air. It's even colder in the hallway, and she goes up on tiptoe so that she doesn't make a sound. She's careful not to turn the light on in the bathroom until she has the door closed and locked behind her, eyes squeezed shut against the brightness of it until she can adjust. Then she peels off her cami and turns to look at --

She chokes on a scream.

Reels of flesh hang off her shoulder blades. _Actual_ flesh -- not long strips of dead skin like sunburned people sometimes peel off, but flesh. It doesn't _hurt,_ it just _itches,_ and underneath ...

Carefully, she locks her fingers together and stretches her arms high above her head in order to make her shoulders bunch up, and she sees something white move underneath the raw, inflamed skin where the lumps were. It looks like bone.

Her stomach churns with a mixture of absolute terror and morbid fascination. She's disconnected from it, like it's not really her own body that she's looking at. She reaches back, pushing at one lump with her fingertips. Her skin gives easily under the pressure, gelatinous and gummy, almost. Underneath it, she feels something hard, ridged, and she'd always just thought it was her shoulder blade, rucked up into a funny position, but she's looking now, and those are _not_ where bones are supposed to be.

It takes her the better part of an hour, goosebumps pebbling all up and down her arms, before she gets them out from under her skin, and it's amazing, how immediately the itching stops. 

It's like when her teeth came in, except.

They're apendages, poking out of her back, strange and a little unwieldy. They're roughly the same size as her hands, bent into a weird V shape and fleshy. She wipes them off as best she can with a washcloth, and then stares. She doesn't need to be told what they are.

"Wings," she whispers. "I've got wings."

 

-

 

Christy's closest friend is Sean Parker. Unlike everybody else she knows, he's white, and he says stupid stuff, like, a lot. He's always trying to hang out with the black kids on the basketball court, wearing a doorag and a shiny gold chain that goes down to his navel, and they tolerate him mostly because they're too bemused by him to know what else to do. "Tolerate" is the best anyone can say about Sean.

He's not all that nice, especially not to the girls his age, and she's pretty sure when he's forty-five, he's going to live in a ranch house in the suburbs and be a Republican, but for right now, he's sixteen and he has his own phone and a car, which goes a long way to forgiving his sins, and he lets Christy sit in the passenger seat even though there's no airbag and he lets her do his precalc homework because she's bored with the math they do in the sixth grade.

Their friendship makes Adrienne nervous, because what could a twelve-year-old girl with no breasts and Sean Parker possibly have in common?

"I don't want you to ever feel like you can't come talk to me," she tells Christy, gentle, while they're waiting in line at McDonalds. 

Christy looks back. The other kids are watching Jake, who's sitting at one of the tables by the play pen, shredding paper covers for the straws and laying them out in neat rows. Sometimes it's hard to remember how sweet Jake can be, especially when he's screaming in public and everyone's staring, but then there will be the times he'll pick flowers out of a stranger's garden or create some strange, artsy design on a tabletop using only discarded paper and say, "Look, look what I made for you, Cissy," and Christy can't feel anything _but_ love for him.

Adrienne watches her, patient.

Christy feels acutely aware of her wings. She wears bulky sweaters all the time now, thankful that the weather allows it, but her wings are growing so fast that she has to sit up straight and consciously keep them tucked down so that her joints don't pop out from underneath her collar. They're covered in this soft, greyish-white fuzz, like down. She doesn't need blankets anymore, which is nice.

She doesn't know what she's going to do when they get too big to hide. Surely not everyone _else_ is hiding wings underneath their clothes?

Is she really the only one?

What will they do with her when they find out?

"I'm okay, Adrienne," she says instead, because she knows Adrienne does a lot, and she does it by herself, and she constantly has to prove that she's capable of doing it by herself. 

Christy isn't going to jeopardize that. She's not.

 

-

 

Sean's the first person to figure it out.

He still has both his parents, but he says they're not around a lot. Christy's never met them, so she assumes that's the truth. He drives their car; a cherry-red classic Pontiac Bonneville with a shiny chrome grill and an engine that doesn't so much purr as it does wheeze and cough and sound a lot it's seconds from blowing up anytime it approaches an incline. The radiator's shot, so Sean can't drive it very far without having to stop and put coolant in it. There's a collection of old, Nina Simone-era jazz CDs in the center console, and they aren't Sean's. That's the only thing Christy knows about Sean's parents.

They're on their way to Wal*Mart after school one day, because science fair time's coming up, and Christy's going to participate this year even though she's not in the seventh grade yet and the science fair is supposed to be seventh graders only. And anyway, she needs a poster board, so Sean drives her.

They're at a red light, and Christy's reading him the entirety of Kanye West's Tweeting history on his phone, fighting to keep a straight face because Sean is laughing so hard he's almost _weeping,_ and before she even knows what's happening, he reaches over and claps a hand to her shoulder. The tips of his fingers curl around the downy top of her wing.

She jerks away, far too late, because the laughter's frozen on Sean's face and his hand is still outstretched, and --

"The light's green!" she yelps.

Sean automatically twists around front again, pressing the gas so carelessly that they lurch across the intersection. His hands form claws around the steering wheel.

"I -- _what?"_ he gets out, voice painfully shrill. He cuts glances at her, quick as winking, like she's too bright too look at. "That was -- _what?!"_

Oh, god. There's no way she's going to stay calm if he isn't calm.

"Sean, _drive._ Don't kill us, drive!"

He parks in the farthest corner of the Wal*Mart parking lot, where a lot of the teenagers go to make out, sheltered in between enormous semi trucks that've pulled off the interstate so that their drivers can sleep. Sean stares at her, bug-eyed, as she takes a deep breath and pulls her hair out of the way, yanking her sweatshirt up over her head.

She's got a tank top on underneath, racerback since that's the only kind she can get on, bunched a little so it can fit around where her wings meet her back. She's been practicing moving them when she's alone in her room, straddling her chair backwards and focusing on stretching them out. They're limbs as much as her hands and feet are, and she's mastered being able to fold them tight and unfurl them to their full length, one at a time. Flapping still takes more coordination than she has.

She has absolutely no idea what she's going to do with them. _Keep them a secret_ is basically as far as she's gotten.

She tells Sean about the itching, about how they just came in like molars one day.

"Are you going to grow feathers?" he asks. 

His voice is still a little squeaky, but it's obvious that he's attempting to be cool about it. She doesn't know if it's for her benefit or his. "I think so," she answers, because she can see the outline of them underneath the down, like someone had drawn a concept sketch of pinions into her skin. She doesn't know how she's going to hide them when they grow in; her wings are too bulky already.

They're quiet for a moment, both of them watching Christy stretch them out so that the tip of her right wing brushes against the dashboard.

Then she folds them up and pulls her sweatshirt back on. "You can't tell _anyone,"_ she says fiercely.

He looks at her like he knows that's a bad idea, but all he says is, "Who would I tell? You're the only person I have anything interesting to say to."

 

-

 

The next time he sees her, he brings her a plastic JC Penny's bag full of old scarves. There are three of them, with big, scratchy cables knitted together, and they're all longer than he is tall.

"You didn't have any," he says by way of explanation, standing in the entryway and shuffling his weight back and forth awkwardly. "And ours never get worn because my mom doesn't like the way they frame her face, so. Here, I guess."

She knows immediately what he's trying to do. There are other people around -- Adrienne's iPad is propped up against the closed piano lid so that Taj can sit on the bench and watch Digimon on Netflix and keep a big bowl of popcorn in her lap at the same time, watching with curious eyes as Sean politely toes his shoes off and tucks them into the cubby -- so Christy very carefully scrunches her wings down and lifts her hair up off her neck and Sean goes around her like a maypole with a bright red scarf.

It takes some adjusting, but as soon as they've got her neck and shoulders largely covered, Christy tugs at the collar of her sweater and relaxes her wings. If it weren't for the scarf and her long hair, her wing joints (she's taken to calling them her second elbows in her head) would be visible.

She grins up at him. "Thanks, Sean," she says, relieved.

He grins back, and it doesn't even have half the amount of faux-swagger to it that it usually does. "No problem."

 

-

 

She doesn't know what it is about finally having somebody else know, but it's like she's been given permission to freak out, and she promptly does so.

She peppers Sean with questions -- how big are her wings going to get? Why wasn't she born with them like a chick, why are they only coming in now? Is she the only one? She can't be, but why hasn't anybody ever heard of winged people before? What if they're all taken somewhere and not talked about, the way they used to lock up people like Jake in crummy asylums? -- and it doesn't matter that there's no way Sean could know the answers any more than she could, it's still a relief to be able to ask them. She cries, too, since that's another thing she's finally allowing herself to do, because her wings keep growing and she can't avoid hugging people and wearing bulky clothes for the rest of her life and gym's going to start again in December, but she doesn't know what else to _do._

She's only _twelve._

"We'll find something," Sean promises helplessly, and fetches her the Kleenex box from the bathroom.

She and Sean spend a lot of time in her room with the door locked. The idea of his own house makes Sean fidgety, so when Christy has to lock herself up somewhere and peel off all her layers of clothes so she can stretch out the kinks in her wings, that's where they go. Usually they drive places, but it's not like the Bonneville has tinted windows, so that's not much of a refuge, either.

Adrienne's hair doesn't spontaneously turn grey on the spot when she finds out, but it's a near thing.

"He's my best friend. Besides," Christy tells her when she sits her down at the kitchen table to talk. "More eyes to watch out for Jake."

"I don't --" Adrienne's mouth works for a moment, trying to find a polite way of saying that Sean Parker doesn't strike her as trustworthy. Christy smiles, checks surreptisiously with her fingers to make sure her wingtips aren't showing from underneath her sweatshirt, and stands up. She passes Big Spud on the stairs, and he makes a sympathetic face at her. There's nothing quite like mothers, whether they're related to you or not.

"Okay, well, they don't exactly have 'help I'm growing wings' listed as a symptom on Web MD," Sean tells her, glancing over the top of his laptop screen as she closes her bedroom door behind her. "And Google just keeps trying to tell me that you're a fallen angel." He squints at her. "You're not, are you?"

She considers this, still in the process of unraveling her scarf. "Do you think they'd let me take trigonometry in heaven?"

"Ha ha," Sean deadpans at her. He looks back to his screen, drumming his fingers against his lips. "I've got one tab here, though."

She balances one knee on the edge of her bed, craning around to check the screen over his shoulder.

And then immediately moves back, rolling her eyes as expressively as she can. "That's a MySpace page," she says, unimpressed, and whacks him with the jut of one wing.

"Well, yes, but --"

"No, Sean, it's a MySpace page with a flashy, animated background. I'm not listening to anything a MySpace page with a flashy, animated background has to say. There's no way it's legitimate."

"Unless that's what the webmaster wants you to think!" Sean blurts at her quickly. He gestures. "What better way to keep it a secret than by coding the text teal and making it sparkle? The information still gets out there, it's just incognito."

She folds her arms.

"Whatever," he waves her away. "Listen to this. 'What if we evolved with wings? What if it's genetic? Scientists think --' oh hey, there's no citation on that. Whatever," he says again, visibly dismissing it. "-- 'that it's entirely possible that humans could grow wings the way a frog grows legs as it matures. Just because we don't see it doesn't mean it's not genetically possible.'" He lifts his voice and points at her, wanting her attention. "'Growth would start at the onset of adolescence. Wings would grow in with bones light and hollowed like a bird's. Do you think they could support and maintain human flight?'"

He looks up at her and beams.

"That's kind of close, isn't it?"

She rolls her eyes to let him know what she thinks of that. "Genetic would make sense," she allows, when he just keeps looking hopeful. "My parents didn't leave any kind of medical history with the agency whatsoever, I'm not surprised they neglected to mention 'may grow wings at some point.' Thanks, guys."

 

-

 

Her feathers come in.

Her down molts off and her feathers come in; long black primaries that frame her little kid hips when her wings are folded; secondaries streaked with whites, greys, and a blue color as brilliant as a noontime sky. Her covers are strikingly blue, too, and soft to the touch. She stretches them out and hears the shutter click of Sean's phone camera. He turns it around so she can see the full effect for herself.

Unfurled, her wings now stretch from fingertip to fingertip. The glossy blue-black of her primaries matches her hair color. She looks like a bluejay.

"Oh, that's wonderful," she says. "Practically every single thing in my wardrobe will clash with that."

 

-

 

She wears a lot of dresses now, too, underneath her sweatshirts and scarves, the longer her flight pinions grow. Sometimes it gets oppressively hot in class, but she doesn't dare take them off. She doesn't dare move, either, because the clothes cover a lot, but there's no way her body shape looks natural upon close examination. She takes more bathroom breaks than is strictly necessary, just for the excuse to lock herself in the stall on the end and relax her wings out of their awful, tense position wrapped concealingly around her.

"There's no way you're going to last much longer," Sean informs her from the driver's seat, watching her squirm around with her seat belt, trying to find a comfortable position.

She hates seats and chairs of any sort. Who invented the chair? They needed to be shot.

Or given wings for a day and then told to sit in school and then in a car and _then_ they needed to be shot.

Traffic is slow-going today, with all the sightseers trying to get in their last glimpse of fiery New England autumn before the last of the leaves fall and winter sinks in. Sean drums his hands against the steering wheel as they cruise along, bumper-to-bumper and well below the speed limit. Christy pokes at buttons on his stereo: it's a cheap-ass thing he got from a garage sale and likes to skip randomly on burned CDs, even when they're not scratched. She hates it, but she loves The Decemberists more and sets to work figuring out its trick.

"I, uh," Sean swallows with a dry click.

Christy stops and looks over at him, alert to something in his tone.

"Listen, is there any chance you could get away for, like, an entire day?" he wants to know. "Soon?"

"Why?" seems like a fair question.

"Because, ah," he shifts in his seat and doesn't look at her. "You remember that MySpace page?"

"Yes?"

"I may have, um, sent a message to the owner."

The seams of Christy's clothes creak alarmingly, wings attempting to flare underneath them as all her hackles go up. She hisses out, "You _what!"_

"I didn't mention you!" he says immediately, holding up his hands. "Honest! I didn't give any information about you or anything, I lied like my life depended on it and, like, 97% of our conversation was pure bullshit on my part, except --" he peeks at her sheepishly. "Except for the 3% that was about how everything they wrote about was real."

"Did you send them the picture?" Her heart is going to pound right of her ribs. She knows she shouldn't have let him keep it. He said he'd tell anybody who went trolling through his phone and found it that it was a Halloween costume or like Photoshop or something, but it still hadn't felt right.

He actually does look offended now. "Absolutely not!" he retorts, defensive. "I wouldn't -- that's like sharing naked pics --"

"Ew, stop talking!"

"-- it's nobody else's business what you look like with your shirt off, okay? But the point is, they say they've got a refuge." She narrows her eyes at him, hoping it looks vicious instead of just scared. "In the middle of buttfuck, Maine, where there aren't any people. It's a safe place for people -- well, people like you. With wings," he clarifies, like he thinks there's some other distinguishing characteristic Christy might get it confused with.

"Sooo ..." she drags out.

He shifts again, eyes flicking to the road and back to her. "I think we should check it out. I Google Mapped it -- we can make that trip in a day and be back."

The radio sputters out something and then goes back to its error message. Christy tries not to look politely dubious.

"Well, hopefully," Sean amends, and pats the dashboard. "But if it's all a hoax, what's the harm? At worst, we look like idiots and I'll be on Adrienne's shit list for the rest of my natural life. But they had a _lot_ of accurate information. If they're legit ... then maybe we can find something that will help you."

"You just want the excuse to go on a road trip," Christy accuses him.

"Hey, now, I'm trying to be gregarious!"

She doesn't know what that means, and turns her face away to look out the window. It's supposed to snow again this weekend -- it's the only thing Jake's been able to talk about all week. He loves snow angels. If they came and took her away, the government or Social Services or whoever, like she was candy that needed to be taken away, would he throw a tantrum?

"Black Friday," she blurts out, when they've almost reached her house. "We can leave really early in the morning. I can pretend I'm out shopping with Alice."

"Do I know Alice?" Sean asks, with a frown that suggests that if there are _two_ twelve-year-old girls unironically in his acquaintance he might just go be a hermit.

"No," and Christy grins. "I don't know who she is either."

 

-

 

She finds a Speaker Bomb in the junk drawer in the kitchen with enough juice in it to run, which is good because she has no idea where the charger is. She takes that, a dusty old Discman with several of her CDs in a slip cover, her messenger bag, and a packet of Sugar Babies that Jake had folded into his towel in the bathroom. She locks the front door behind her and sticks the key in the dirt between the struts of a pink flamingo.

By the time the sun comes up, she and Sean have crossed the border into New Hampshire, giddy on a highway rush and half of Daft Punk's discography playing loudly in Christy's hand.

Sean doesn't have the heat on, out of deference to her comfort, so he's as bundled up as she is, with the same fake letterman jacket with the heavy shoulders and the low-crotch jeans that the black boys at the high school usually wear, and they can both see their breath on the air when they bellow "Harder Faster Better Stronger" loud enough that the driver of the minivan they're passing on the right glances over, eyebrows lifted, even though there's no way she could possibly hear their music or them.

They stop frequently, whenever there's an opportunity, although traffic on the 95 is so bad that it's hard to merge off and on -- Christy doesn't know if that's usually what traffic is like on the interstate, or if it's Black Friday shoppers clogging everything up. The Bonneville's radiator is still busted, so Sean doesn't dare drive much above the speed limit and he needs to top up the coolant every time they stop, so Christy finds a door with a lock and pull her layers of clothes up to neck so she can stretch out her wings. She can flap them now, a full-body movement that unbalances her and oftentimes knocks any loose articles off of nearby tables and desktops. In station bathrooms, the gust from every downstroke sends toilet paper and used paper towels skittering across the tile in a whirlwind. All her muscles scream in relief.

They get coffee at a gas station with cracked, ancient-grey pavement in its lot, just before they cross the inlet into Maine.

Neither of them have ever worked a gas station coffee machine before, but cheap coffee seems like the thing to do when you're road tripping, and what they come out with is a horrific-tasting mixture of too much sugar and not enough cream. They stick it in the cup holder, where it makes the whole interior smell like burnt beans.

According to Google Maps, the whole journey should only take four and a half hours, but it's well past noon when Sean says, "Hey, check the directions, is that our exit?"

Christy makes a valiant grab for the print-outs, where they'd gotten crunched up in the footwell. "Exit 113 towards Augusta-slash-Belfast?" She peers out through the windshield.

"Well, here goes nothing." Sean makes a long, exaggerated wail as they cruise off the exit, like he and I-95 are being forcibly separated from each other. The Bonneville echoes it, a pathetic screech deep in the engine.

"Turn right," says Christy with no sympathy.

One backstate road becomes another becomes a third, four lanes dwindling to two with little cross-traffic, taking them past rocky bluffs and towns with names like Blue Hill that advertise fresh-caught lobster dinners and oceanfront inns with weekly rates. Christy forgets about the discomfort in her shoulders and keeps her face close enough to the window that her breath fogs it, hoping for a glimpse of the sea.

They've just passed a town called Rockwell, established 1901 with a population of 523, all suburban houses clustered up along the rocky coast like brightly-colored terns, when Christy looks at the directions and realizes, "Hey, we're almost there."

Impulsively, Sean reaches over, gripping her shoulder the same way he'd done the day he discovered her wings, giving it a reassuring squeeze.

 

-

 

It takes them two tries and one u-turn pulled in a grassy lot in front of a baffled-looking doe and her fawns, and then they find the address: it's invisible from the road, and they would have missed it entirely except for the mailbox with the house number painted on the side, peeking shyly out of the woodsy overgrowth. There's an unpaved drive behind it, and tree branches scrape the sides of the car as Sean inexpertly makes the turn.

The property, when they reach it, looks like something cut out of a 50s-era print of Life magazine, some iconic picture of Americana slapped onto a backdrop of snowy evergreens and hills, aged up.

The house is big, bigger than anything Christy's ever lived in, a pale sky color with white shutters and a wrap-around porch, with stately weathered columns and a porch swing with an afghan carelessly tossed over the back. Behind it, just past an abandoned firepit with a ring of stools around it, is a red barn, the paint faded and the boards broken in places. It looks like someplace that Catholics or uptight corporate busybodies would go on retreat.

"Jesus Christ," Sean mutters. 

"It's cute," Christy responds, defensive. It's not really, but she's had a long drive to work up all of her nerves and expectations.

Before the Bonneville even grumbles to a stop, the screen door to the house swings open. An older man and two blonde boys step out, coming to the edge of the porch and lining themselves up there, hunching their shoulders up against the cold. One of them says something to the others, brusque, but Christy can't hear it from the interior of the car.

She twists around, looking back the way they came, and is not surprised to find that from this far up the hill, the front-facing windows of the house have a perfectly clear view of the highway, making any approaching vehicles easy to spot. Enough time, she thinks, her heart giving a throb of excitement, for anybody with wings to hide themselves before any approaching car made it up that winding drive. That has to be intentional. She can't be imagining that.

Neither she nor Sean move. The youngest boy jumps down the porch steps and starts towards them. He's got loose curls, thin eyes, and he's picking at a Twizzler Pull-n-Peel with his fingernails, shoving one string into his mouth and scuffling the frosted grass.

Sean cranks the window down in slow jerks. Christy's grip on the strap of her bag goes white-knuckled.

"Mark," says Sean confidently, when the boy ducks down.

"Coolkat666," he replies with a heavy air of resignation, and it's so ridiculous to hear that come out of his mouth that Christy can't help but laugh. Sean just gives her a cocky grin, all, _whatever, I know I'm awesome,_ and the boy's eyes cut to her. Then he double-takes, ducking down further in the window to get a better look at her, his eyes going bright and hard, the color of diamonds. Christy can't tell, but she thinks he's probably older than her, but younger than Sean, and the way he's staring at her, it's intense enough to make her feel strangely sunburned, oversensitive, like he could see straight through her scarf and the heavy layers of her clothing, like he could trace the lines of her feathers from there.

Mark swallows his bite of Twizzler. And then he says, in a voice that shakes at the edges, "So. You weren't lying, either."

Before either of them could say a thing, he straightens up, turning back to the house and shouting, "We've got one!"

 

-

 

Hogarth Hughes neatly straddles that middling point between middle-aged and elderly, with neat grey hair and a jovial smile, as crinkly as a walnut; he was born on this property, he tells them, has been a citizen of Rockwell all his life, and since neither Korea nor Kuwait could kill him despite their best attempts, he's fully intending on dying on this property, too. Except for time spent on active duty, where he met his wife, he's never even left Maine.

When he was younger, the house used to be a lot smaller, since it was just him and his mother and the occasional renter they housed out of their spare room, but he expanded it when he opened his doors as a refuge for winged folk.

"Why?" Sean demands. He's holding Christy's hand tightly in his, their knuckles raw and red from exposure to the cold, and she doesn't know if it's for her comfort or his. Her heart is racing, because he said winged folk, like it's plural, like there might be more than one _here._ "You don't have wings."

"No," Hogarth replies easily. "But my wife did. Let's just say ..." he stops and looks out across the woods for a beat. "Let's just say I know what it's like, trying to hide something big."

He doesn't elaborate, and Sean, who doesn't have heavy wings under lots of clothes shielding himself from the weather, starts to shiver as they wait, before Hogarth finally turns around, looking right at Christy.

She stiffens, wondering if now is when she's supposed to show her wings, if she has to prove Sean right.

"My dear," he says, solemn. "I can't imagine what it must have been like, going through this on your own." She startles and Sean squeezes her hand, but doesn't interrupt. "You are very brave, taking the risk and coming up to see us. I promise you now, you can be safe here, for as long as you want. Months, years, the rest of your life -- we will never turn you out. You can get an education here, you can work from here, you --"

"Can I fly?" Christy blurts out, and immediately flushes when Hogarth's eyebrows go up. "I mean, can you train me? To fly?"

His eyes crinkle up, and he grins with all his teeth. "I was going to save this for last, as a treat. Come on," he gestures, and then leads them across the dry, snow-dusted yard, out towards the barn. There's a spring in his step.

He heaves the barn door open, stepping back with a flourish and a bow.

Letting go of Christy's hand, Sean stoops down in the entryway, plucking up a long, black feather out of the straw scuffed underfoot. It's sleek and streamlined, and Sean cheerily tucks it behind his ear.

"How do I look?" he asks, and jerks sideways when she tries to pinch his ribs, stepping around him.

The barn has a high, vaulted ceiling, and obviously hasn't been used to house livestock in years: the straw on the floor is moldy, trodden down into the cement, and all the stalls have been knocked down, forming a workshop and a lounge area with a plushy, low-back sofa and a recorder set up on a tripod in the middle. The hayloft is the highest point, easily twenty-five to thirty feet off the ground. Sean snorts, elbowing her and pointing out a hot tub at the other end of the barn, empty now for the winter with a tarp pulled over it. There's a zipline running from the loft all the way to the pool, with large, padded mats underneath the whole route, like the kind you find in a gym or a judo.

Christy breathes out. "Oh," she says, because she can see it so clearly in her mind's eye: climb the ladder, grab hold of the zipline and take a running leap, wings spread and catching on the descent.

When she turns back around, Hogarth catches her eyes and smiles.

"What do you say?" he asks. "Are you ready to meet the others?"

 

-

 

Christy bought an Audubon Society field guide to North American birds from the bargain bin in Good Will, back when her wings were still fluffy and downy and new. It's warped a little from having been waterlogged in the past, half the color in the section on flightless birds runny and bled together.

She has the diagram of wing anatomy memorized, comparing her book to her own extended wing, and she's confident in her ability to identify a large majority of the birds she sees on their profiles and wing shapes. Stepping into the front room, letting the screen door bump against her backside as it closes, makes her blood go singingly hot, because she can see movement further inside.

There are other kids here.

_With wings._

She steps around a flung-about collection of boots right inside the door and passes the stairs, crossing the threshold into the living room to get a better view. With the shades drawn so that no one could peek in through the windows, everything has the gloom of early twilight, but Christy has no problem distinguishing the features of those gathered before her.

The room is a collection of low-backed sofas, not dissimilar to the ones in the barn, and a lot of ottomans; Mark and the other boy he'd been with are both sitting on one, pressed back to back.

Except for one kid, lounging against the doorframe in the back -- gangly and long-limbed, with slim black wings as long as the rest of him, like someone who's been rolled out and stretched as thin as dough -- everyone here is white, which throws her off for a beat. She doesn't remember the last time she'd been in the company of majority white people, besides Sean, and momentarily wonders how she should best approach this. Does she have to be politically correct? What's offensive to white people? Crocs? Isn't she supposed to not mention Crocs around white people?

There's only one other girl. She's tiny like a doll, with wings as auburn as her hair, coarse-looking and speckled with browns and blacks like a perching sparrow's.

She brightens and waves when Christy meets her eyes. She's wearing striped knee-high socks with orange toes, and a man's old suit jacket, pinstriped brown, which has strips cut out of the back to make room for her wings. They flutter and refold easily as she shifts her weight. Like Mark did, she stares straight at Christy's shoulders like she can see right through the scarf and the layers of clothing.

Another winged boy sits on the arm of the sofa, and he slides off into a standing position when he sees Christy, his startled look turning immediately into a smile, as if he can't believe she's any more real than she him.

Christy smiles back, and then feels it freeze, catch, like a skipped CD. He's got wings, but they're crumpled like a paper plane, bent and twisted up. Feathers stick out of them in bedraggled angles, patterned yellow-and-black like a goldfinch's. He holds them tucked close to his body, the way she's seen people do with deformed hands.

He's got on a bright pink shirt that says "PositiviTee: Fight AIDS in Africa" and Christy reads it twice so that it doesn't look like she's openly staring.

What happened to him? Why are his wings like that?

"Holy shit," she hears Sean breathe behind her, eloquent.

"Well?"

That's Hogarth, coming around front and gesturing grandly like he's on stage. She sets her bag down.

"What do you think?" he wants to know.

Christy looks around again, at Hogarth and Mark and the other boy, at the three winged kids, all looking back at her expectantly. They don't look much older than she is now.

"I think," she says slowly, reaching up and starting to unwind her scarf from around her neck, gaining momentum so that when she speaks, her voice comes out stridently happy, "I think I'm never going to wear another scarf as long as I live."

 

-

 

They have breakfast for dinner: waffles with peanut butter and maple syrup; scrambled eggs and omelets chunky with spicy chirizio, mushrooms, and onions; a box of Fruit Loops that Mark monopolizes early on, leaning back in his chair so nobody else can have it, his lizard eyes flicking back and forth.

Christy has never felt more self-conscious in her entire life, nor has she been more excited about it. It's freezing in the dining room, but she's been living under so many layers of clothes for so long that she barely feels it, sitting in her racerback tank with bare arms and bare wings, forking bites of waffle into her mouth and wondering if there's powdered sugar anywhere. She can't talk fast enough to suit anybody, because questions keep coming in before she's done with the first; did her wings coming in hurt? What's the weirdest thing she did trying to get the itching to stop? Does she have any idea what determines wing color?

For the first time in his life, Sean is not the loudest or most interesting person in the room. He gets ignored through the whole meal.

Afterwards, Hogarth starts delegating tasks.

"I think we'll bunk you with Erica," he tells Christy, and then to the auburn-winged girl, "You've got a spare, don't you?"

"Yes!" she replies. "And clothes, too," she adds, correctly interpreting the way Christy's fingers tighten on the strap of her messenger bag. She'd had the forethought to pack the most important things -- her documentation, her Florida sweatshirt, three of her favorite books, her music, and a framed picture of Adrienne and all the kids from Jake's birthday party at Chuck E Cheese's -- but not anything else, because she hadn't actually been brave enough to presume.

"I can stop by Good Will next time I'm in town," Hogarth decides, talking more to himself than to them. "And pick something up for you."

"Then you should drive down to the one in Blue Hill," interjects Christopher, balancing plates on one arm and the skillet for the omelets in his other hand. Christy can hear water running in the kitchen, and somebody's voice yelping, _too many suds!_ and another replying, _oh my god, look, I can make a beard!_ "It'll look less odd if you're buying girl's clothes there than it would in Rockwell, where everybody knows you don't have girls."

"True," Hogarth allows, dry. "I could make a trip out of it. It'll give me an excuse to drop by the Whole Foods for more --"

"SUSHI!" yell five different voices at once, as if the words "Whole Foods" was a trigger, and Christy jumps, bumping a chair with a wing.

"Oh, please?" Erica adds on a gasp, clasping her hands.

"A big platter of it, Dad, not those skimpy little packs you got us last time."

"Greedy bastards," Hogarth complains, good-humored. To Sean, he asks, "Are you staying, too?"

"Nope," Sean answers.

Christy swivels her head to look at him. "What?" she goes, reeling. Well, yeah, not _forever,_ but Sean can at least stay the night, can't he? It's already dark outside, he can't drive all the way back in the Bonneville by himself. What if she breaks down? What music is he going to listen to, if Christy's got the Speaker Bomb?

He shakes Hogarth's hand and reassures him that he won't breathe a word about this place to anyone ("good," says Hogarth happily, "because I'm a bit rusty on how to kill people with thumbscrews, and I'd hate to have to kill you painfully,") and she trails after him when he goes into the kitchen to have a strange, stilted, and oddly subtextual conversation with Mark than she can't parse.

She pulls on a sweatshirt before she follows him outside, glad to take none of the usual care, because it doesn't matter here if her wings are visible.

The wind cuts through the fabric, and she ducks her wings down, wrapping them tight around herself like a shawl, and shuffles from foot to foot. Sean jingles his car keys in one hand. Their breath mists in the air in front of their mouths, pearly white.

"Are you going to tell Adrienne anything?" she asks, nervously breaking the silence.

Sean scuffs at the dirt with the toe of his sneaker. "I'm not going home," he says, and quirks his mouth humorlessly at her startled exclamation. "If you're going to stay, I probably shouldn't? I mean, think about it like CSI -- your foster mom definitely noticed us spending suspicious amounts of together, so if you disappear, they're going to blame me. I'd better disappear. 'Sean Parker is a pedophile' isn't the reputation I want."

"That's stupid, nobody's going to think that," Christy says vehemently.

"Everybody's going to think that," Sean corrects her. "Also, I don't want to go back to school. Ew, school," he wrinkles his nose.

"What are you going to do instead?"

"Do something else. Try my luck. Travel. Lie about my age. See California. _Anything,"_ and there's excitement now, stretching at the corners of his mouth like the potential isn't something he can keep contained in his own skin.

Before she can second-guess it, Christy steps around the grill of the car and hugs him tight. 

He hugs her back immediately, and huffs a laugh when she wriggles around to ruck up her sweatshirt around her neck so she can stretch her wings out and fold them around him too. They're big enough that the action almost entirely cocoons them. The feathers on the insides of her wings are soft, cushy, and pale white, so it's a lot like being hugged by a fluffy warm towel.

Sean holds on for another moment more, then says, "Take care of yourself, little angel," in a voice that comes out a lot more ragged than he probably means it to.

Then he pulls back.

Christy stands on the porch and watches the taillights of the Bonneville disappear; they reappear at the bottom of the hill, blinker flashing for a right turn onto the empty highway. From inside, Erica calls her name and she goes.

 

-

 

She'd always been told that, for kids, going to school is as important as adults going to work.

 _Think of it like your job,_ Adrienne told her, whenever Christy complained about how much she didn't want to go, since math was so stupid and she hated all the other kids in her grade and she hated the principal for telling Big Spud he couldn't pray in the hall during prayertime anymore, and isn't it like how they don't go to Target -- if you don't like what a company's doing, then you shouldn't go? Why isn't school any different. _You have to go and you have to do your best, Christy. People depend on it._

So when Monday comes and goes, it's the only thing she can think about all day. School's started again after Thanksgiving break and she isn't there. 

_I'd be in Social Studies right now,_ she thinks, catching a glimpse of the clock when she goes downstairs for lunch, and wonders if anybody in her class has noticed her absence yet. Maybe it's a good thing she never bothered to foster any close friendships; there's nobody to miss her or come looking for her besides her family.

She's trying really hard not to think too much about Adrienne, or Jake or Big Spud or Taj.

Erica drops onto the bench next to her, cuffing her soundly with one wing. "What are you thinking about?" she wants to know.

"How that's a stupid question and also _ow."_ She rubs at the spot where Erica hit her through the starchy new fabric of her vest. Hogarth drove out early on Saturday and came back with a big sample platter of sushi, birdseed, and three bags of clothes for Christy. Everything's second-hand and a couple years out of date, and not everything fits quite right, but Christy's used to that, and it's all long sweaters and jeans and pale skirts just the right shade to bring out the color in her hair and wings.

 _I'm a photographer by trade,_ he'd shrugged, when Christy looked at him in askance and, behind him, Dustin sneakily smeared wasabi on an inari and tried to get Mark to eat it. _I've got an eye for what looks good._

Eduardo and Erica taught her how to cut strips out of all her tops (she wouldn't let them cut the Florida sweatshirt, which she promptly balled up and shoved underneath her pillow, but everything else was fair game) and safety pin together at the hem once she'd got them settled around her wings.

"But really," Erica insists, pulling back the cellophane on the leftover turkey carcass from Thanksgiving and offering her some.

"Social Studies," she confesses, and then quickly looks away.

The kitchen is another part of the house that Christy's fairly sure came straight out of a magazine. Her Social Services agent would have called it "homey": it's painted sunshine-yellow with paisley trim, and there's red-and-white gingham curtains over the window, a quaint-looking spice rack over the stove and an old, lead-lined fridge that rattles miserably in the middle of the night. There isn't nearly enough room inside for two people making food simultaneously, much less four kids, their wings, Christopher, Mark, _and_ Hogarth.

So there's a picnic table in the dining room for eating, with a bench on one side and a hodge-podge collection of dining chairs on the other. The chairs are all turned backwards, like every chair in this house is; made to be straddled by somebody with wings, not sat in.

"Oh," says Erica with sudden understanding. "If you don't mind schooling yourself, we could start you right away. Mark and Hogarth are probably putting a curriculum together. If you want, we can loom over them threateningly and see if they'll put it together faster?"

"They better give me a _real_ math class," she mutters, mutinous, and Erica laughs. 

It looks like she's never cut her hair in her life; long, twisted strands of it run down her arms and in between her wing joints. Christy thinks it must have been really useful, having that huge mane of hair when she was growing her wings, covering her shoulders and back in a ratty, tangled mess of auburn, brown, and black. She tilts her head at Christy and asks, "You do like it here, right?"

"Of course!" says Christy immediately. 

She likes the house, she likes not being alone, she likes rooming with Erica, who is fourteen and has been living with the boys for so long that one of the first things she told Christy, unironically, was that she probably would have killed somebody if she had to go one more year without another girl around.

 

-

 

Stairs are suddenly the easiest thing Christy's ever encountered. 

She, Erica, and Eduardo take them four or five at a time, and sometimes can even clear six in a single bound, so long as they get a running head start and coordinate their downstrokes right. Christy hasn't had the courage to try the zip line in the barn yet, but sometimes if she's up early in the morning, she sees light pooling out through the broken boards and glowing through the grime in the windows. Eduardo's bed is the only one that's empty.

Hogarth lives in the new addition, tucked out behind the garage on the ground floor. It has its own bathroom ("with a Jacuzzi!" Dustin moans enviously, like there isn't a hot tub in the barn) and a dark room he uses to teach them how to develop film the old-fashioned way. It makes Christy feel strangely archaic, pinning pictures to a clothesline and watching them form in the dim, scratchy red light, like she belongs in another world entirely.

"Not bad, huh?" Hogarth asks quietly, catching her holding up a picture of Eduardo; he's off-center, like he wandered into the shot accidentally, carrying a mug in one hand and grooming one slender wing with the other, fingers pulling through his feathers.

She puts it back. "You're really good," she says wonderingly.

Hogarth chuckles, and pats the wall next to him the way someone might to a beloved pet. "I got to keep this place going somehow," he acknowledges. "Turns out almost dying for your country doesn't pay that well, so I do what I can for the extra cash."

Everybody else rooms on the second floor, where Hogarth confesses he doesn't venture very often, because he and stairs don't get along very well after he busted his knees out in Kuwait.

He gives her the tour on her first night, while Erica fetches clean sheets and blankets out of the laundry and Christopher goes out into the garage to see if they've got spare toothbrushes packed into storage. There are two empty, unfurnished rooms; Eduardo, Mark, and Dustin all bunk in the big one with the excellent bay window overlooking the surrounding woods; Christopher gets one to himself; and Erica and Christy share the bedroom closest to the stairs, which -- judging by the boxes of things she finds pushed to the back of the closet -- probably once belonged to Christopher's grandmother, Hogarth's mother, the original owner of the house.

They've got a bathroom, but it's a mess. The trashcan's overflowing and the shower curtain's missing from its rungs, shoved into a wadded-up pile in the corner of the tub. From the doorway, Christy can tell they're pterodactyl-themed, and wonders if the whole house has a flight motif.

"Oh," says Hogarth, chagrined. "There's supposed to be a chore roster. Sorry about --"

"Please," Christy interrupts dismissively. "I've lived in foster care all my life. I know how this goes."

 

-

 

And that's the truth. 

Christy Lee will always find a way to fit in, wherever she goes.

She's practically MacGyver when it comes to this shit, okay; just give her a toothpick and some string and she can build a home out of it.

Don't doubt her.

 

-

 

Christopher Hughes is Hogarth's son.

Everybody calls him Chris, but after the first week of them both answering the other's summons because their names are too similar, which is both inconvenient and highly confusing, they come to the agreement to call each other by their full names. Christopher. Christina. It's all very formal, but it helps.

He's fifteen years old. Every night before he goes to bed, he checks his back in the bathroom mirror, looking for the lumps that mean his wings are coming in. They haven't appeared yet.

"They might not," Erica tells her in an undertone, waiting their turn to brush their teeth and watching Christopher tug his shirt back down to his hips. He squirts Crest onto his toothbrush, which is old and shaped like a Hot Wheels car, and looks through himself in the mirror, his eyes unfocused. "We don't know how it works. His mother's got wings, but that doesn't necessarily mean he will."

Christy nods. She's seen the pictures -- there aren't any lining the staircase, of course, because that's just begging to get them knocked off with one enthusiastic flap, but there are a couple squirreled away in other places; the bottom shelf of the bookcase in the study, the end table by the entryway, tucked behind a bachelor's diploma and a framed photo of Hogarth's mother and stepfather on their wedding day on the mantle above the fireplace.

There's one in Christopher's room, too, that she saw on accident; a shot of a middle-aged Hogarth in fatigues, shaking hands with a light-skinned woman washed out by the desert sun, standing in front of a school with an uncut ribbon stretched across its doors. Her eyes are cool, distant, her mouth unsmiling, and she's wearing full chador, the way Big Spud's mom sometimes did when she was giving religion another go.

It's the perfect shape, Christy realizes, to hide a small pair of wings.

"It has to do with puberty, right?" she says, remembering what it said on Mark's MySpace.

"Right," Erica agrees. "Which is why you and I got ours early. But Chris is already older than the other boys were when they grew theirs, so." She shrugs, helpless.

Christy shrugs back. She doesn't ask where Christopher's mother is now.

 

-

 

It snows all through late December, like the weather abruptly realized it's been far too reasonable and lenient on Maine thusfar and needs to make up for it before the calendar turns over for a new year. It buries the house up to its eaves in places, and they spend the holiday subsisting largely on canned goods and powdered milk until it stops snowing long enough for the plows to come through.

Hogarth's got a buddy that lives a couple miles down the highway and owns a Christmas tree farm, so he brings one by before the weather gets bad (Hogarth, Chris, and Mark go out onto the porch to meet him, and do not invite him in) and they set it up in the living room, so that it frames the menorah sitting on the window sill.

Being the only ones in the household that aren't Jewish, Christy and the Hughes sit out on most of the celebrations, watching the others inexpertly fumble trying to recreate traditions they hadn't paid a whole lot of attention to while they were still with their families, or else celebrated differently. On Christmas, Hogarth surprises them all with new name plates for their doors, engraved and decorated like the kinds you'd see in business offices, each one themed with a different winged animal (Erica's is a pegasus, Eduardo's is a swan, and Dustin jokes that Mark's should be a bloodsucking vampire bat,) and on the last day of Hanukkah, they finally get the drive completely shoveled, and Hogarth goes down into town. He comes back with groceries, fresh ingredients, and a recipe from Ruth at the dry-cleaner's for challah.

It doesn't come out particularly pretty, but it tastes amazing.

They celebrate the New Year in the barn, which is the only place besides the dining room large enough to hold them all. When the ball drops and the countdown hits zero, Dustin flings himself on everyone so enthusiastically that Christy finds herself picking yellow feathers out of her hair the next morning. Even Mark submits himself to a hug, and Hogarth doesn't share his champagne with anyone.

Christy still doesn't know what to make of Mark.

She wants to like him, if only because he's the reason she's here at all. He's three years older than she is, and he doesn't talk down to her like the others do sometimes, just because she's small and girly and has a high voice, and when she asks, he shows her the program he uses to track keywords in blogposts and Xanga updates, trying to find kids like Christy before it's too late.

He's got this way of watching Erica, though, that makes Christy's skin crawl, intense and golden-lit and a lot creepy.

Erica, if anything, seems used to it.

"He wants to see me fly," she explains, as she and Christy swap papers so they can grade each other's homework. She pushes her hair back over her shoulder. "That's all. He pinned all his hopes on me. Dustin ... well, Dustin. And Eduardo won't ever be able to," she nods knowingly at Christy's flinch. 

She's seen Eduardo jump the zip line multiple times. He just _drops._ There's no other word for it.

"He's too tall, and his wings are too small. You've seen the way he eats, right?"

"Yeah." Adrienne tried Weight Watchers once, and Christy has hazy memories of her counting calories. Eduardo does the same thing; he attacks his food with mathematical militarization, sectioning off precise portions and never going for seconds at the dinner table. He eats for fuel, not enjoyment. She hasn't seen him with his shirt off, but she imagines there wouldn't be an ounce of fat on him, trying to trick his body into being something trim enough for his wings to lift.

"But you and me," Erica says quietly. "We're small-boned. We might have a chance."

_It's like your bones are made of air._

 

-

 

There are three computers in the house; one in the study, where Mark spends all of his time and the other boys have to tag-team him if they want a turn. Hogarth's got one for work, and the last is Erica's laptop, which she had the foresight to steal from her parents when she ran away. It's got a broken fan that whirs miserably at every new operation, and there's no wireless, so they have to use an ethernet cord to connect to the Internet, and that tethers them to within six feet of Erica's desk.

The week Christy finishes all the home-schooling material for the sixth grade and asks to be moved up, Mark calls her into the study to show her the Amber Alert that went out after her disappearance.

"They tracked you this far." Christy startles, because there on the screen is a grainy picture of her and Sean together inside that gas station, crowded in front of the coffee machine. The frame skips, this time showing Sean up at the counter as an employee hands a heavily-bundled, oddly-shaped Christy the bathroom key. A pause, and it flips back to the first picture.

Underneath, it says LAST SEEN with the address for a town in New Hampshire she doesn't remember, but they were probably only there for ten minutes, tops. There's an awful picture of her from the fifth grade yearbook, smiling painfully, and the description of Sean's car incorrectly identifies it as a classic Chevy Impala, with only partial plates caught on tape.

"There's been nothing new since then," Mark tells her. They both look at the timestamp; the newest notice came out the week before Hanukkah.

Christy nods, and then says, in what she hopes is a convincingly flippant tone, "Yeah, but I am a foster car kid. They don't bother to look very hard when we run away."

Mark looks at her, and glances away the second she makes eye contact. 

"You know that's not true."

She shrugs. She knows it's not. Adrienne wouldn't give up on her. Adrienne never gave up on her, not even when she went through that stage where she thought everybody who ever looked at her was picking apart all her faults and subsequently screamed at everyone who so much as glanced at her sidelong, not even when she started spending all her time with Sean Parker, a sixteen-year-old with a reputation for treating girls like a joke.

She was happy in Adrienne's home.

Happy, but not _safe._

"I could," Mark offers, shoving his sleeves further up his arms and drumming his thumbs nervously against the desktop, close to the space bar. "I could fake an IP address, send in a tip saying you've been spotted in London. Ontario," he clarifies, when she just looks bemused. "London, Ontario, it's a -- never mind. Fake trail. Make it look like you absconded over the border. Do you want me to?"

Christy thinks about it. "They'd inform my family of the update, wouldn't they?"

Silence is Mark's answer, and Christy nods again, decisive about it. She knows what it would feel like if Jake or Taj went missing, and someone lied and said they were in Canada when they really weren't. "No, thank you."

"Fine." Mark brushes a blue feather off the desk, and then, changing his mind, catches it before it twirls to the floor. Christy moves for it in the same instance, and they bump heads.

"Sorry," she mumbles, stepping away from the desk and rubbing at her skull.

Her wings, as far as anyone's been able to tell her, have grown to their full length, stretching six feet wingtip-to-wingtip. Her body weight has doubled, even with the hollow bones. But, even more embarrassingly, the rest of her has started to grow, leaving her rather unsure about where her body's positioned in space. She's been bumping her head into things a lot lately.

There's a pause. Mark says, "I had wings too, you know."

She looks up. He starts pulling his arms through his sleeves, like he's about to take his shirt off, and Christy, who still has the locker room sensibilities of a twelve-year-old girl, yelps and quickly covers her eyes.

"Just look," Mark's voice snaps at her.

She does, and goes cold all over.

In her last home, she had a brother who had bone cancer; they removed his leg at the knee and fitted him with a prosthetic limb, which they colored red, white, and blue because he really liked Captain America and he used to have this shield that he took with him whenever he went in for chemotherapy. But sometimes when she went in to say goodnight after brushing her teeth, she saw the end where the limb used to be, the calluses and the puckered flesh.

This looks a lot like that: an amputation. 

She can see the knobbly joints where Mark's wings met his back, but the flesh has grown over them, pale and horrifically scarred, spread across his back like starbursts.

"We're called cutwings," Mark says, flat, like he's narrating a story he has no part in. His joints move under his skin with his words, like they're still looking to stretch the wings that aren't there. "This is what happens to most of us when our parents realize we can't hide them. This is why it's so important to find you."

"And why it's so important that you see Erica and I fly," Christy finishes for him quietly.

Mark's whole body lifts with his next inhale, like he's dreaming of flight.

 

-

 

Dinner that night is four different kinds of store-bought ravioli, heaped in steaming bowls in the center of the table. Somebody half-heartedly cooked up some peas in a generous nod to the food pyramid, but they sit untouched at the end of the table as everybody elbows and wings at each other to get the biggest bowl of pasta.

Around a mouth full of four-cheese, Christy winds up explaining that unless she's an original -- wings have to start somewhere, after all -- her birth parents completely neglected to be entirely truthful as to the contents of their medical history, including previous immunizations, hereditary dispositions towards depression or alcoholism, or (oh hey!) _wings._

"I got it from my mother's side," Dustin volunteers cheerily. "My dad was never in the picture. She drove him off early. That's how she dealt with things, my dear old mom: she shoved them down and ignored them until they went away.

"So -- oh, thanks," he accepts a bowl that Erica passes across the table, and then scowls when he realizes there's nothing in it except residue water and empty ravioli skins. "So when my wings started coming in, she -- she -- she bound me up with linen cloth, starting here," he touches his sternum, at the spot just level with his armpits. "And going all the way down to my waist. Bound me up so tight I could barely breathe, and wouldn't unwrap me until the end of the day, when she ducked me under the showerhead for five minutes -- I remember an egg timer -- and then bound me back up again for the next twenty-four hours. I wasn't allowed to touch. I definitely wasn't allowed to scratch. I wasn't allowed to ask questions. I think she thought if she squashed them down, they'd stop growing, or become like ingrown toenails or something."

"Thanks for that, Dustin," Eduardo murmurs, setting his fork down. He looks green.

Christy glances back at Dustin, whose mangled yellow wings clash horribly with the orange, Halloween-cat sweatshirt he's got pulled on around them. She imagines how they might have looked, if they'd been allowed to grow freely like hers or Erica's or Eduardo's.

She shoves her bowl away, suddenly no longer hungry.

"When that didn't work," Dustin continues, musingly. "She tried breaking them and binding them again, so they'd fuse into a smaller, more convenient shape. Kind of like how they used to bind girls' feet in China, I guess."

Mark's the only person still eating. When he reaches for Eduardo's bowl, Eduardo waves at him in a go-ahead gesture, and Mark happily drags his bowl closer and goes for the tin of marinara sauce, dumping the remainder of its contents over Eduardo's plain pasta.

"I think she thought she was being kind. She was a cutwing, after all, and we try not to visit upon our children the sins visited upon us. But!" Dustin comes back to himself. "By that point, I'd met Mark online, and --" he makes a self-evident gesture, like, _here I am._

"It was both my parents," Eduardo shrugs.

"Same," mutters Mark.

"My dad," Erica offers mildly, swirling the sauce at the bottom of her bowl. "Although we didn't realize it at first, because my mother's husband -- the man I lived with all my life and called Dad -- wasn't _actually_ my biological father." She shrugs, like, _oops, mistake anyone could make._ "Once I started getting all feathery and they pulled me out of school, my mother realized that hey, if it wasn't her and wasn't Dad, process of elimination right? So she made some calls and oh, yeah, sorry about that, here are some tips on how to cut her wings off. So Dad filed for divorce and I ran away. Are there any meat and mushroom ones left?"

 

-

 

Being the only remotely responsible adult around, Hogarth's usually in charge of meals, although Hogarth's idea of a meal usually involves some clever utilization of Spam, so in the interest of not having to eat like rationed wartime soldiers in the Pacific, everybody does their own thing for lunch, and then takes turns cooking dinner.

Christy's exempt from this, as she's twelve and not yet tall enough to possess full mastery over the stove.

Dustin and Erica are really good at it; Dustin claims his mother taught him early on that unquestioning servitude was the man's role in the house, and Erica's idea of good cooking primarily involves frying things in an inch-thick layer of oil, which is fine, since fried is everybody else's idea of good cooking, too.

Eduardo never makes enough for everybody when it's his turn, Christopher's culinary specialty lies in reheating bulk-packaged frozen chicken strips from Costco, and the only thing that saves Mark from poisoning them all by inattention is Eduardo's routine timely interventions.

On Mark's days to cook dinner, he takes refuge in the girls' room, since it's the last place Eduardo would think to look for him.

"It should really be you cooking, not me," he mutters, inspecting the contents of Erica's shelves. "'Fair and equal division of labor' is meaningless if there's no fair and equal talent."

"Yes," drawls Erica, who doesn't look up from her laptop screen no matter how much Mark angles himself for it. "Because Canadians are all culinary masterminds. You've discovered our nation's most closely guarded secret. Prepare to die."

Like Christy, she didn't escape with much, and even less when you consider that she had to sneak across the border. It's much, much easier to get out of the United States than it is to get into it. Mark picks up a snowglobe and tips it, sending the Vancouver skyline swirling.

"I meant more because you're girls."

This succeeds in capturing Erica's attention. Slowly, she turns around in her chair. "Excuse me?" she goes, dangerously.

Mark gesticulates impatiently, like it's their fault they can't see from point A to point B. "You're girls," he says obviously. "It's a kitchen, there are sharp knives and fire and dead things, what's more fitting than that? Of course that's where your talent lies."

"... okay," Erica says, still in that low, threatening tone. With an irritated flip of her wings, she pushes herself to her feet, and orders Christy, "Get up."

Christy makes a face at her. Just that morning, she'd discovered the Rick Riordan books some clearly deluded soul had stuffed back behind a boxed-up stack of Final Fantasy collectibles on a bookshelf in the study and spent all afternoon freaking out about it. She _wants_ to disappear in 500 pages of fast-paced quippy dialogue and delightfully bastardized Egyptian mythology, and that's an intense schedule that doesn't have room for whatever humiliating thing Erica's planning for Mark today.

Although, granted, it's usually pretty funny.

"Come on, get up," says Erica again, brisk, and Christy folds the dust jacket over to mark her place and grimaces when she rises from her bedspread, spine spasming in protest. She misses being able to read upright in bed; these days, the only comfortable position is flat on her belly, wings half-furled, and even that's tiring after awhile. She's only _just_ gotten used to sleeping in that position. "Grab that backpack," Erica adds, and then to both of them, "Come on."

She leads them out to the barn, Mark trying the whole time to backtrack and undo whatever he said, which fails spectacularly because he's even worse at being apologetic than he is at not being a dick.

"Is the wind being particularly loud, Christy, I can't hear anything," Erica says airily, bracing her feet and hauling the barn door open.

"Oh, mature," Mark snaps at the back of her head.

She does look at him this time. "I don't think that word means what you think it means," she informs him, and then beelines straight for Hogarth's workshop, which is a disorganized jumble of shelves, half-finished projects gathering dust under the weak light of bare bulbs, melted clay and paint flecking the strawn-strewn floor and the mouth of the kiln and even, strangely, the blades of the carpentry saw. She dodges around that, snatching a stick of window paint off one of the tables, and yanks the lid up off a box stacked behind the stall door.

"Open the backpack for me," she orders, hauling out a fat cement block. She takes the window paint and writes something on it in big, runny letters, before she drops it into the bag Christy fumbles open for her.

She does this several more times, until Christy has to squat down because the backpack's too heavy to hold upright anymore. She catches a glimpse of what Erica's writing on each brick -- things like "impossible beauty standard" and "sexual terrorism" and "can't be emotional without mockery" -- and Mark complains, "What are you doing?"

Deciding that's enough, Erica stands, taking the backpack from Christy and zipping it up.

"These," she holds it out to Mark. "Are the unspoken weights women have to carry around every day," and Christy blinks, fascinated. She's known this, of course she has: even at twelve, she's experienced a lot of it. But until now, she didn't realize there were actually _words_ for them. "Today, they're yours! Remember this next time you think about telling me what to do because of my set of chromosomes."

"Jesus, it was just a joke," Mark mutters, but it comes out half-hearted at best. He slings the backpack on, adjusting the straps and grimacing when the weight of it bows him backwards; never mind his ugly temperament, his moods, and his inability to not say hurtful things, this is what Christy trusts about Mark the most: he will always do whatever Erica asks him to.

 

-

 

Mark's the first back into the house, and as Christy shakes the drifting snow out of her hair and feathers, she hears Eduardo's startled, "What happened to you?" come from the kitchen.

"Erica," Mark's voice returns, and Eduardo says, "ah," like that explains everything.

Preening modestly, Erica adjusts her cap, pulling it down further over her red-bitten ears, and heads into the kitchen. Christy follows.

"Scoot, you," Erica tells Eduardo, who's standing in front of the sink with some enormous tome of Julia Child's propped open in the crook of his elbow. The kitchen is narrow and very bright, positioned so that one window faces east and the opposite window faces west, letting in light no matter the time of day. The corners of the book are warped, stained from where something dark got spilled across it, and several pages are flagged with green tabs, bearing Eduardo's handwriting, saying, _healthy!_

Bemused, Eduardo moves out of the way, almost stepping on the trailing end of Christy's wingtip and causing them all to juggle for space.

"I," Erica announces, as she starts pulling out supplies; bringing the mixing bowl down from the cabinet, the rolling pin from the drawers, and dusting the cutting board with flour. "Am a woman in the kitchen and I am making traditional gender rolls. Which you will choke down."

"Will they be Canadian?" Mark snipes at her, from where he's backed against the counter, sneakily adjusting himself so that it takes most of the backpack's weight.

"Yes," Erica deadpans in response. "I will bake them with love, maple syrup, and universal health care. Scoot," she says again to Eduardo, waving the rolling pin at him in a menacing way.

 

-

 

Christy tries to roll over onto her back in the middle of the night and wakes herself up, her wing bending in a strange direction and shooting pain up through her shoulder.

With a groan, she flops back down onto her stomach, trying to twist her neck into a comfortable position that doesn't make it feel like she's suffocating herself into her pillow, shifting her wings and then resettling them along her back, tucking them in to cover her bare calves from the cold. Outside, the porch light flickers on, probably scaring the hell out of some poor doe that came too close to the house while investigating the compost heap. She catches the gleam of Erica's open eyes across the room.

There's no moon tonight. Christy sleepily murmurs, "Why can't you fly?" and then immediately wants to kick herself.

Erica remains quiet, long enough that Christy starts wondering if maybe Erica's one of those people that can sleep with their eyes open. Then she says, "I was everybody's best bet for it until you came along. Dustin designed the zip line, but I was the first person small enough and light enough that when I let go, I _glided."_

Giving up on finding a comfortable position, Christy pushes herself up onto her elbows, watching the blink of Erica's eyelids above the blanket she's twisted creatively around her.

"But you don't just need to be small and light in order to really fly." After a beat, she prompts, "What do birds have that we don't?"

"Tail feathers," Christy answers.

Remembering her Audubon book, the diagrams of wings and tail feathers and the physics of flight mechanics, air lift and steering, she grimaces at the idea of growing feathers out of her butt.

"Evolutionarily," Erica starts, and Christy wonders how long she's been lying awake, because there's no way she would have been able to sleep-slur that word, fresh woken-up. "I don't understand why we grow wings, without any of the supporting features that birds or bats or insects have. We don't grow feathers out of our ankles to help us steer. We don't have _nearly_ the abdominal development --"

"How do you know? Have you seen Eduardo with his shirt off? In the name of science?"

"-- to support tireless, uninterrupted flapping or the fine-tuned equilibrium needed to balance, to coordinating turns and landings. We really got screwed over," she muses. 

"Why can't we work at any of those things? With enough practice --"

"I got a fever as a kid," Erica says baldly, and Christy stills. A lifetime in foster care has taught her what kinds of words come next. "And it went to my brain. I grew up small, I grew up tiny, I grew up everything Dustin and Eduardo and Mark want to be, but I can't fly because I cannot determine depth perception. I crash into things," she elaborates.

"Oh."

"And it sucks. But you, you might have a chance."

"... does this mean Mark's going to start staring at me instead?" Christy wrinkles her nose, pulling her Florida sweatshirt around her shoulders like a cape and bunching her pillow up under her chin.

"We're all going to stare at you," Erica says, quiet. "Until we know for sure."

 

-

 

It doesn't take her long to learn that Eduardo's the same age Sean is. As people, they really couldn't be more different.

Christy never had any trouble getting along with Sean, because he was just too _ridiculous_ to ever take seriously; the way he dressed and talked always seemed like a costume to her, like he was dressing up and play-acting. It was easiest just to let him get away with it than to burst his bubble.

Four years of age difference suddenly feels like a lot, like Eduardo is somebody she's supposed to respect. It might be the fact he's confined to the house that makes him overcompensate and try to be more responsible than he really is, like a real adult, but it makes her feel strange, shy, and all of twelve years old whenever she's around him.

(Except when they're talking math. Christy and Eduardo can talk about math _forever_ and she'd never get bored, because he's taking the highest levels offered by the home-schooling curriculum Hogarth's been ordering them online and she's bullied her way into sharing his worksheets. He's the only one that can keep up with her, frankly, but he's also kind of dumb if he thinks it's quicker to simplify complex rational expressions than just multiplying them by their reciprocal to get rid of the fractions, _come on,_ how does he expect to get anywhere if he always does it the hard way?

Erica finds their habit of tackling college-level calculus texts that they download on Mediafire _hilarious,_ because there's a lot of math that's still beyond them, but they'll never admit it because it's a _competition,_ Erica, god. Besides, by the time you get to that kind of theoretical math, everything's expressed in variables. 

"Doesn't it defeat the purpose of math if no numbers are involved?" she asks, baffled and laughing.

Christy and Eduardo ignore her.)

 

-

 

Eduardo's voice calls across the barn. "It's really common, where I'm from." 

He waits until Dustin goes whizzing overhead on the zip line, whooping and scattering feathers in his wake, before he crosses the mats to join Christy on the sofa.

She peeks out at him over the edge of her afghan. There's no heat in the barn when nobody's firing anything in the kiln, and in the dead of winter, everybody gets really resourceful when it comes to blankets and how they can be folded around a winged person. Christy feels like some pale, defenseless larvae, cocooned tight, and there are gloves on her wings. Feathers only go so far when it comes to warmth.

"The wing gene?" she guesses.

" _Sim._ If anyone ever tells you Sao Paulo is the city of angels, now you know why." He draws his long legs in close to his body, shivering hard and yanking two afghans out from under him. He flings them over his head and reappears when he gets them settled properly. His back looks humpy where he's got his wings tucked away.

He considers his words, wrapping his hands in fistfuls of afghan and tugging it up to his chin. "Well," he amends, burrowing. "It's really common among a certain demographic. Which, _tipo,_ probably has to do with intermarrying, but almost all the kids I grew up with -- we were born to cutwing parents, and destined to be cutwings ourselves."

"That's awful," Christy says quietly.

"We didn't think much of it. To us, getting our wings cut off was inevitable, like -- oh, I don't know, like circumcision --"

"Gross!" she complains.

"-- or like someday having to shave. We never talked about it, it just _was._ Sometimes, to deter kidnapping for ransom -- because, forget the trauma of being kidnapped, what if one of us gets snatched too close to the onset of puberty? You have to control situations like that," his voice turns ironic. "-- our parents would send us to special boarding schools in the United States, where they had unlicensed surgeons on staff trained in amputation. It was all very discreet, very well-paid. It was a whole ..." he waves his hand. "Culture."

"So how did you wind up here?" Christy wants to know.

"Amazing, blinding good luck," Eduardo answers frankly. "The day I started itching was the day I met Chris."

"I was in town," Christopher says suddenly from behind them, making her jump. He throws himself over the back of the sofa hard enough that it almost unsettles them both, and promptly starts wrapping himself up in blankets to join their burrito party. "Because my grandmother had just retired to Miami and she wanted to show me her retirement home. I saw Wardo itching from across the street and immediately knew what he had to be."

Dryly, Christy says, "And he persuaded you to run off with him?" 

Eduardo looks unrepentant, like that's in no way weird.

"Winter was hilarious, the first year he was here," Christopher reminisces, wistful. "He'd never seen the snow before."

"Shut up," Eduardo responds, without heat, and shuffles underneath his blanket pile so that he can stretch one wing out into the open air. He reaches out, stroking the feathers all the way to the tip. "I got to keep them, didn't I?"

Nobody says anything, watching the shift of trim, black feathers as Eduardo continues to preen. He can condition all he wants, Christy thinks, whittle his body down to streamlined muscle and count calories and study the nutrition facts of everything he eats, but those wings aren't ever going to support him. They're the wings of a frigatebird, a tern, sleek and made for diving, not flight.

"When it's summer again," he says abruptly. "We should all head to the lake."

Christy blinks at him. Of course there's a lake up here. They're in the middle of the woods, why should she be surprised there's a lake, too.

On the other side of the barn, Dustin hits the mats with a solid _whumph._ Christopher snorts. "You only say that because you win _every_ game we try to play," which makes Eduardo laugh, a slow roll in his throat. He spreads his wings to their full reach, sending the blankets sliding to the cement.

"What can I say?" he goes with a grin that's all teeth. "We breed waterbirds where I'm from."

 

-

 

Eduardo loves, Christy thinks, and bounces the eraser end of her pencil off her paper, frowning. Eduardo loves ...

What does Eduardo love?

Erica's easy. Erica loves things with color; sweaters and socks, food and artwork, the thousands of shades of green and grey and brown that paint the woods that surrounds them. She loves the brightly-glazed things they pull out of the kiln; decorative bowls with sunflower print and cups with crooked handles that could arguably be underwater-themed, but are really just lumpy blue. She loves the different colors in voices, and lays on her stomach on the carpet in the den, fiddling with the dials on a boxy old radio until she finds one of Rockwell's few stations playing Sunday blues. She loses herself in Ella Fitzgerald's mournful warble: a color, she says, as deep as cobalt.

Hogarth loves big things. He loves America and he loves the good state of Maine. He loves democracy, freedom, good will, and the idea that he's making the world a better place for the marginalized. He loves the land he lives on, the rugged wilderness that hides them, and the kids that call it home. He's loved whole-heartedly for too many years to be able to distinguish the minutiae of it.

Christopher loves his father and he loves the neat, wooden frames that hold his mother in place. He loves things he can't touch, like the marshmallow structure of an atom and the acceleration of the universe, hurtling them through space into immeasurable mystery. He loves nothing more than that moment before he goes to bed, that single second he's standing in front of the mirror before he pulls up his shirt to check his back for lumps, same as he does every day. That single second is limitless to him.

Dustin loves being able to say "okay" to things. He loves giving people a "yes." Dustin's as complicated as any of them, she supposes, but not in this: Dustin loves the things that they love, because they love them. He loves the things that make them smile and make them laugh, and they make him beloved in return.

And Mark loves Eduardo, she knows, because Eduardo was the first thing his fledgling eyes saw. Mark's parents cut his wings from his body and then Chris brought Eduardo back from Miami, and when he grew wings, Eduardo became the first thing Mark could keep, and Mark loves the things he can keep, tucking them as close as his own ribs.

Mark loves Eduardo the way Christy loves boxing the answer at the end of a half-page of equations, secure and safe, as if saying, _I found you. I found you. I took this problem and from it, I found you._

 

-

 

Hogarth likes to pretend that the bathroom on the second floor doesn't exist, and one day in February, Christy gets fed up with it, because Erica and the boys keep ignoring that part of the chore roster and it gets _gross._

She empties the overflowing trash (eugh) and Windexes the mirror and scrapes fossilized toothpaste from the sink basin. Since this does nothing but give her a detailed look at the grime build-up, she goes into deep-clean mode from there, fetching a bucket out of the garage and filling it with bleach solution. She holds her breath until the porcelain on the toilet glows white again.

She's scrubbing at the tiles, wings half-flapping to keep her balanced with every jerk of her arm, when Mark comes up the stairs.

"-- told him that you're allergic to peanuts, but he won't take my word for it and wants me to double-check with you before he does anything drastic to the recipe," she hears, and then, "What are you doing?" Socked feet hit the edge of the bathroom tile, and she looks up.

Mark looks back at her, and then he goes shockingly, suddenly white.

One hand comes out of the kangaroo pouch of his sweatshirt, like it's going to cover his mouth, but it's too late: he doubles over, vomiting onto the white-blue patterned tile, abrupt and violent and the most completely helpless thing she's ever seen him do.

It takes Christy approximately two seconds to put two and two together, between the smell of the bleach in the bucket by her elbow and Mark's reaction.

"Oh my god," she says in horror, leaping to her feet and throwing the scrubber down. Stripping off her gloves, she tosses them behind her, too, and approaches him just as he rolls with another heave.

Mark's whole body shudders through aftershocks, spittle dripping from his mouth. He pants. She puts her hands on his shoulders, gently steering him into the hall so she can shut the door. "I'm sorry," she murmurs, once, twice, three times, and catches him when he half-falls, hauling him up before he can crumple to the carpet.

She takes him to his room. She's never really been in the boys' room before; she leans against the wood underneath Dustin's name plate -- patterned with pterodactyls -- and shoulders the door open.

Eduardo, Dustin, and Mark have all been around longer than Christy and Erica have, so they've had more time to accumulate stuff: she sees posters on the walls, postcards of Maine and a photograph of someplace that might be Brazil pinned to the corkboard, potted ferns withering at the ends of their leaves from proximity to the heating vent. A napkin bearing a signature she can't make out is framed above Dustin's hammock. A mobile dances from the ceiling fan, and the breeze that comes in from the hall twirls the angels, tiny golden trumpets pressed to their mouths.

She eases Mark down onto the bottom bunk, and he draws his knees to his chest so he can bury his face in his elbow, breathing unsteadily. 

"I'm so sorry, Mark," she says. "I'll be right back."

She heads out into the hall, throwing herself down the stairs in one soaring leap. Dustin's in the dining room when she cuts through it to the kitchen, and he calls after her distractedly, "hey, are you allergic to --" but she's already snatched a glass from the cabinet and is filling it with water. She turns around, thinks about it, turns back and snatches a bowl. Dustin's bemused, "Christy? Hello?" follows her back up the stairs.

"Here," she says to Mark, kneeling down by his bedside and handing him the glass.

He takes it from her, sipping, and part of her wants to cover his shaking hands with hers, but she doesn't. She hands him the bowl instead.

"Don't swallow!" she says quickly, when it looks like that's exactly what he's going to do. "Don't swallow anything fifteen minutes after you first throw up, okay? Your stomach's too sensitive. Just rinse and spit to get the taste out of your mouth, that will make you feel better. Here, the bowl." She waits until he's done that a few times, and lets him set the rest of the water and the bowl aside. "And don't eat anything for forty-five minutes. Got it?"

Mark opens his eyes. He looks first at her and then drifts lower, reaching out to touch the stiff cut of her primaries. Her wings are half-furled against her back.

"You'd think I'd be over it," he says after a moment, muttered and bitter. "It was two years ago. And both my parents are cutwings, so I knew it was coming, but it was still ..."

He blanches, fingers stilling against her feathers. Christy doesn't say anything.

"It wasn't like with Wardo. We didn't know any specially trained surgeons or anything. We had a room, in our basement, with cement floors. They fed me brandy until I got dizzy and then they strapped me down and --" he yanks his hand back, wrapping his arms around himself and fanning his fingers out across the places where, she knows without being told, his scars are, underneath his clothes. "I woke up and the whole room smelled like bleach. They'd gotten all the blood up, but they saved me a few feathers. They were blue, like yours." He chuffs out a raspy laugh, humorless. "We might both have been jaybirds."

"Mark ..."

"That's how it'd been done to them," he tells the carpet between them. "So that's what they did to me."

Unbidden, Christy wraps her arms around him and presses close, careful to keep her wings folded as tight as possible against her back so that they don't smother him.

He doesn't hug her back, but he doesn't stiffen or push her away either, which is why she's close enough to hear the throb of blood in his throat when he whispers, thick, "I have three little sisters."

She immediately goes cold, all the way through.

 

-

 

The seven of them eat away the groceries pretty fast, so between that and other sundry errands, Hogarth usually drives into town every three days. The trips down to Blue Hill, where the population doesn't even cap 3,000 but is still the closest thing to a big settlement in these parts, are rarer still, but Blue Hill has a Chinese restaurant and a Whole Foods, so sometimes for birthdays Hogarth will bring back take-away.

He drives a big truck that runs on diesel, with an engine that turns over like thunder. It used to have some kind of logo on the side, but that's been bleached off, leaving a scrubbed white mark on the driver's side door.

He does photography, mostly, and outsources the sales to some of the galleries along the coast that attract the tourists from the Mid-Atlantic looking at summer homes. Mark set up a website for him -- he rounds up everybody and has them vote on which photos he's going to offer as prints, and he always makes sure to include some of the ones they took -- and helps him with his Etsy store, which he uses to sell ceramics, branded on the bottom with a figure of a bird caught mid-flight ("subtle," Christy remarks, and Hogarth chuckles,) and little scrap metal holiday ornaments that scarcely weigh more than a paperclip.

"My stepfather used to be an artist," he tells her, when she comes into the barn to watch him fire something in the kiln, half because she's interested and half because it's blazing warm when he does so. "He made these huge metal sculptures. I don't have his vision, so mine never come out as striking, but he taught me a few tricks. I try to do one at least once a year."

Hogarth considers these crafts as important as their schoolwork, since they help pay for the upkeep of the house and the barn.

So, a couple hours a week, he teaches Christy how to take pictures; what it means to get good exposure, good light, and how to develop them when she's done. He teaches her how to work the pottery wheel, how to glaze it and fire it, and by Valentine's Day, she has her own set of dishware, stacked in the cabinets with everybody else's. She didn't try to make any crazy designs, like Erica's, but instead just burned her bowl, plate, and cup a deep, glassy emerald green.

 _My brother's favorite color,_ she tells the dinner table, quiet. Everybody nods, because she talks about Jake a lot. She has to.

Hogarth's easy nature when it comes to teaching surprises her, because she isn't used to old white men being nice to her. It's no use telling anyone she's Cambodian, and if anything, _she's_ the one that should have fear of _them_ branded into her genetic code, because those that are old enough to remember the war have never gotten over it, and Christy's dealt with the brunt of that prejudice all her life without ever understanding it, which isn't fair.

To be fair, Hogarth seems to really dislike the Russians, which she doesn't understand, either.

 _Cold War,_ Eduardo tells her, like that's supposed to mean something. Christy hasn't gotten to that part in world history yet -- she's still swamped by sensory overload coming from the Industrial Revolution.

But Hogarth talks about Sputnik in the hushed, vicious tones Christy imagines is more appropriate when used in discussion about Lord Voldemort. It's weird.

"Anyway," he continues. "It's hard to sell the big stuff in a town the size of Rockwell. My stepfather only made a few commissions here, including that big monument in town. Did you know we had something fall out of space once: our biggest claim to fame, memorialized forever in the town square. You should see it sometime!"

Which is pointless, of course, since there's no way Christy can fit her wings under any kind of cover anymore, so unless they start inventing Invisibility Cloaks, she's not going anywhere.

Christopher and Mark are the only ones who can leave the property safely, and usually one or the other goes with Hogarth, especially when the list includes items that he doesn't understand, like, "new iPod connector cord ~~Dustin~~ mice chewed through my old one." Dustin goes too, sometimes, but only during the winter months, when he can bundle up in a parka that goes down to his knees and nobody looks at him funny for it. Even stunted and deformed, his wings are too big for most clothing.

"We're more careful in the summer months -- you'll get tourists sometimes, searching the woods for more space debris. Meteorites, too," he adds thoughtfully, and grins at her curious expression. "There's a big call in the science community for those, you know. So yeah, there are more pedestrians around in the summer. Which is a shame, because summer's the best time to try to find thermals."

 

-

 

Later, she can never decide if it's coincidence or not, that Hogarth's away when it happens.

The day that Special Agent Jurisevec comes to the door, Hogarth leaves early in the morning, before anyone else is awake. He bundles up in heavy, woolen plaid and makes a huge thermos of coffee, leaving the pot on to get the rest of them up. He hikes far up into the woods, in search of the perfect dawn-colored shot of the wildlife; of nesting spring birds and bucks high-stepping through the remnants of fog as it rolls out to sea.

At five past eight, Christy's on the balcony outside Christopher's bedroom, beating out the rugs over the railing in exchange for being allowed to borrow his iPod, which is the size of a postage stamp and clips onto her collar and plays The Decemberists on shuffle, when headlights cut through the morning grey and the trees below.

It takes her one beat, two, to realize that a car is snaking its way up the drive. She doesn't think. She drops the rug and grabs hold of the railing, and swings herself out over empty space. Her stomach plunges away from her, but her wings slam open and catch her, so that her body follows at a slower pace. She manages a controlled glide to the ground, backwinging hard to catch her landing. She staggers anyway, jogging a few paces across the gravel to kill her momentum. She turns and hurtles up the porch.

Christopher's just coming down the stairs when she comes through the door, morning light catching in the blue of his eyes.

He blinks at her. "Weren't you just -- did you just --"

"Car!" she gasps out, and beelines for the end table. She grabs a lighter, braces one foot on the tabletop, and shoves herself up so she can flick a flame underneath the smoke detector enough times to set it off. She counts to five, and then flips the switch to make the shrieking stop. The fire alarm's the only thing loud enough to hear throughout the entire house.

She turns back to Christopher, who's still frozen on the landing. "Hogarth's not here," she says. "What do we do?"

He pulls her into the living room, where they meet Eduardo and Mark coming out of the kitchen; there's a wet splotch down the front of Mark's Santa Cruz shirt from where he obviously spilled his breakfast over himself when the fire alarm sounded. They crouch down by the curtains just as, outside, gravel crunches and the car rolls to a stop in front of the steps, brakes whining low. Christopher cranes his neck to see between the gap in the curtains.

He pales. "They've got US government plates!" he hisses.

Mark goes still.

"Government?" Erica's voice echoes from the stairs in a fierce whisper; she tiptoes across the room to join their huddle, her hair still rattily braided from sleep and her eyes bleary, her shirt not settled correctly over her wings. "Why's the government outside our house?"

"Do you think they've got the right to enter the premise and search it?" Eduardo goes worriedly.

"What do we do?" Christy says again.

"Erica," says Christopher, with authority. "Find Dustin. I want you to take him and these three here --" he gestures to Christy, Eduardo, and Mark. "And take them into my dad's dark room. Flick the switch so that the light goes on, the one that warns people not to come in. I don't know if that's going to stop anybody really bent on searching," he admits, as Eduardo opens his mouth to ask exactly that. "But Dad gave me a contingency plan when it came to potential invasion by the FBI. We're not ... overly fond of the government in this town, let's just say."

Footsteps thunk up the porch.

"Go!" Christopher whispers, panicked, and Erica runs up the stairs so fast she might as well be flying; Eduardo's hand slips into Christy's, pulling her up into a hunch-backed crouch, trying to avoid any direct sight lines outside. The other hand reaches for Mark, but Mark twists away, quick as an adder in the grass, and he weaves in between the ottomans, heading for the front door.

"Mark! What are you doing?"

"This is me," Mark answers, toneless. "They're here for me. I should talk to them."

"Are you _crazy!"_ Christpher blocks Mark's path, putting a hand to his chest. "You can't do that! You're a missing persons, and it's fine when we're just wandering around Rockwell or Blue Hill, but it's really stupid to show yourself to somebody with US government plates!"

The doorbell rings.

For one terrified beat, nobody moves.

Then Christy and Eduardo seize Mark around the armpits, manhandling him backwards before he can say a word. Not even attempting to be quiet, Erica hauls Dustin down the steps, and together, the five of them sneak through the kitchen towards the new addition. Hogarth's bedroom is still and quiet, no lights on inside. The dark room is a tight squeeze, with five people and four pairs of wings, but fortunately, the tub is empty and there's nothing on the clothesline, so Christy and a scared-awake Dustin both climb into the tub and perch on the edge.

"Hi!" Christopher's voice comes floating down the hallway.

"Good morning," a man's voice answers in a deep baritone that makes Christopher sound unbearably childish in comparison. "I'm Special Agent Dallas Jurisevec, I'm --"

And then Erica gets the door shut all the way, turning the lock slowly so that it doesn't make a loud click. Beside her, Eduardo flicks the switch to turn the light on outside.

"What's going to happen if that man wants to search the house?" Christy whispers immediately. "It's really obvious that it's not just Hogarth and his son living here. We left breakfast out in the dining room. Our _names_ are on plaques on our _doors."_

"Hogarth will have thought of that," Erica answers confidently. "He'll have taught Chris what to say. And if there's one thing Chris has learned over the years, it's how to lie convincingly."

Eduardo, however, is busy worrying about something else.

"What did you mean, they're here for you?" he asks Mark, not whispering but keeping his voice deadly quiet.

Every head swivels in Mark's direction. He sits tucked up in the corner and looks back at them, stony-faced. In the eerie red glow of the dark room, his face is made of enough angles and sharp contrasts that Christy thinks she could cut herself on him.

"Mark," Eduardo prompts.

"Fine," Mark snaps out. "Fine, just. Since July, IP providers are allowed to report suspicious activity to the FBI in the interest of copyright protection. Remember? Not a lot changed after that law passed, except people are more careful when they're torrenting." Nods all around. Christy vaguely remembers the Internet going dark for a day in protest, sometime last year. "That's not the only suspicious activity they're allowed to report, so I've been extremely careful with every post I make."

"They're here because of your Wiki editing or something?" Dustin asks, disbelieving.

"Not ... not necessarily," Mark admits. "I've been exchanging e-mails with ... some people. They used to be East Coast based, but they've moved down to this big property in Louisiana. I've been reasonably confident for a long time that they're like us."

Instantly, Erica goes, "What do you mean?"

"A refuge. There are four of them that I know are definitely winged -- I hacked somebody's Photobucket account -- and we've been talking for awhile. They want us to work with them. They have this idea that if we create a big enough network, then we can coordinate a simultaneous reveal so massive that there's no way anybody could cover it up in time."

Christy reels. "You mean, like, they want to come out with their wings? _Publicly?"_

"Yes," Mark whispers back. "They don't want to hide anymore."

"That's stupid and it will never work," Erica says dismissively. "But I don't get it. What does that have to do with Chris being out there, stuck giving an FBI agent a big fat burger of bullshit?"

"I was stupid," comes the candid reply, surprising them. "I gave them our location. I did it securely!" he cuts in quickly before any of them could hiss anything at him. "Same as I did with all of you! I _know_ what I'm doing and at the very least, I wanted to let them know that there's another refuge out there, if they have anyone to refer to us, but --"

"Either they're not as cautious as you are," Eduardo finishes for him, sounding horrorstruck. "Or they betrayed you. _Mark."_

"Like I said, _I_ should be dealing with this, not Chris."

Before anyone else could speak, Dustin cuts in with a curt, "Don't be stupid," and after that, nobody says a word. They sit there in that red, frightening room, where no windows and no ventiliation and five warm-blooded bird bodies make it incredibly hot, incredibly fast, and wait for Special Agent Jurisevec to get bored by the small-town retreat in the woods, run by a liberal veteran-turned-photographer and his yes-sir son, and leave.

 

-

 

Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss are Eduardo-tall, but where Eduardo is all slender greyhound muscle, they are _full,_ broad-shouldered and deep-chested, with wings as speckled and freckled and wide across as a partridges', forming a busy pattern that clashes with their athletic clothes and makes Christy's eyes cross if she looks at them too long. 

Even in a picture, turned towards them on Erica's laptop screen, they have a commanding presence.

"That one," says Mark, pointing at the next one, who is leaning against the balcony railing and looking like he wound up in the shot by accident. "Is Divya. You'd like him," he adds to Eduardo, who simply accepts that in stride, nodding.

Divya has grey wings, almost flawlessly well-groomed, and there's a shimmer to to the surface of his cover feathers, an iridescence like a soap bubble that reminds Christy of rock doves.

Anne's using a mug with the San Francisco Giants logo on it to hide her face from the camera, but what Christy can see if her flat nose and eyes makes her homesick for Adrienne. She's by far the oldest winged person any of them have seen; her feathers are black, tipped in green eyelets like a peacock's, which makes her elegant to behold. Mark tells them she does marketing work from home.

They live in a big house on an island off the coast of Louisiana, out in the Gulf. It's only accessible by a bridge that closes every night at ten and opens the next morning at six. There's a factory nearby, pumping debris and industrial run-off into the warm, oily water, so the beach is mostly dead; between that, the mosquitos, and the high cost of pumping in clean water, there aren't a lot of inhabitants on the island. Cameron and Tyler's dad owns the house, which is built up on stilts the way coastal homes in storm countries are. He built it specifically for his sons, so they'd have a place to fly, to be safe.

"They want to go to college," says Mark, shutting the laptop lid.

Christy goes into the kitchen and starts rearranging the cutlery rather than listen to Mark, quietly and unapologetically, try to justify his mistake. She lines up the tines of forks evenly -- there's no point, of course, because the next person who dives in here for a utensil isn't going to stop and comment on how neatly everything is arranged -- and as she does so, she realizes:

_I flew._

And her heart starts pounding.

 

-

 

Hogarth comes back just as Special Agent Dallas Jurisevec of the bad brakes and the US government license plate is leaving, and they have the same discussion on the front porch that he and Christopher had inside; Hogarth with his telescopic Nikon lens still looped around his neck and stubble rough across his lower jaw, catching his wide eyes over the agent's shoulder to where Christopher's standing in the doorway, trying desperately to communicate which lies he told using the power of interpretive eyebrows, so that his father would corroborate the story.

Afterwards, Hogarth comes through to the back, throwing open the door to the dark room, scaring the living daylights out of all of them and making Erica shriek.

He is angrier than Christy's ever seen him, a pure, concentrated beam of rage that passes through bodies and wings and lands on Mark.

"You," he says. "Explain."

They file out of the dark room, Erica disappearing to shower and put on real clothes and Dustin into the kitchen because his stomach spent the last fifteen minutes growling and whining and rumbling in constant protest, demanding to be fed. They rejoin them in the dining room, where Mark's telling the story again; the Winklevosses' southern estate, their plan, and how talking to Mark about said plan attracted the attention of the FBI.

Hogarth's face goes through several interesting colors, finally settling on a dull, angry red. Christy knows he has the intense dislike of the government that she's seen from abused, bitter veterans before, but this seems different, more personal, almost. Like the sight of a man in a suit set off something alarming inside Hogarth's head. Christy doesn't know how Mark can stand being the center of that microscopic attention; she sits at the other end of the dining table, trying not to make a sound.

"-- know what will happen to this place if they find out?" Hogarth is roaring. He gulps down a breath, recentering himself, his features relaxing back into the shapes she knows. "I know you didn't do it on purpose, but you _have_ to understand how important it is to keep a secret. If --"

"And what's so wrong about them knowing?" Mark shoots back, as neat and pointed as a knife to the back. His face looks reptilian, immobile, but his eyes are fiercely, shockingly cold.

Hogarth yells, "Are you _kidding me?"_

"Why should we _need_ to hide? Why should we need to cut the wings off our children -- create whole _cultures_ centered around it?" he spits the word out, and beside her, Christy feels Eduardo flinch backwards. She nudges his wing with her own, like fledglings huddled in a nest. "There are enough of us, there have to be, and it's the government's job to _protect_ us, so why shouldn't they know?"

"Protect?" Hogarth echoes, like it's the last word he expected to come out of anyone's mouth in conjunction with the word _government._

"Yes, _protect._ They're supposed to protect kids like Dustin and my sisters and --" he cuts himself off there, physically recoiling from the conversation. He folds his arms and glowers out the window; the fog's all burned away, the sun a pale, springtime light, and the dining room window looks out onto the barn and the compost heap out behind it.

Nobody says anything for a long moment; Hogarth's breathing hard through his nose, like it's costing all his energy to have this argument, like it's a marathon he needs to run.

Silence. The room smells like pine, and like Erica's shampoo.

"I want to do it," says Mark finally, and Christy's watching for it, so she sees the way he flexes his shoulders, rolling the extra joints there, wanting the wings he doesn't have anymore. "If enough of us go, if enough of us come out in public at once, it'll be a phenomenon. We _exist_ \-- we exist and people should have to acknowledge us."

"I'm with you," Dustin sounds out instantly. He's standing in the kitchen doorway, empty cereal bowl in his hand and night-time retainers in the other; he hadn't gotten a chance to remove them before Erica hauled him out of bed. He rustles his crooked goldfinch wings. "I'm not afraid."

Hogarth stares. "Dustin --"

He raises his voice slightly. "I don't want what happened to me or you to happen to anybody else, your sisters especially. Okay? We can do this."

Looking bolstered, Mark turns to the rest of them expectantly.

To Christy's surprise, Erica starts shaking her head. "The first place they'll send us is right back to our parents," she says firmly. "I don't know what you see in that head of yours, Mark, but whatever else you imagine us to be, we're still kids. Kids are property of their parents, even when their parents cut their wings off in the name of good intentions. We deserve a place to be kids, and that's not --"

She waves a hand in the direction of the road, meaning, _out there._

"Putting this place in danger of being exposed is an incredibly assholish thing to do," she finishes. "Don't do it."

Nonplussed, Mark doesn't say anything, his face frozen again into that non-expression. Then he starts nodding, minute bobs of his chin, accepting that the same way he'd accepted the backpack full of bricks, and doesn't argue with her. It is, in Christy's opinion, the nicest thing Mark's ever done for Erica.

Eduardo, next.

To nobody's surprise except Mark's, another head shake.

"Wardo," Mark says, betrayed.

"No," Eduardo vocalizes, quietly, helplessly, like this is the first time he's ever denied Mark anything and he doesn't know how to do it right.

"Wardo, you have to," and Mark sounds fifteen suddenly. It's almost embarrassing; it makes Christy want to look away, like it's not something she's supposed to see. She finds Christopher studying a loose thread in his sleeve, and Eduardo's throat rolling against the collar of his shirt, a desperate swallow. "You have to come out."

Again, "No."

Eduardo, who abandoned everything and moved thousands of miles when Christopher promised him a place he could grow wings and keep them, had used up all his bravery. 

"I'll go," somebody says, and a beat later, as six heads swivel around to face her, Christy realizes it's her. She looks back at them. "If that's what it comes down to, I want to help," she says, and this she directs at Mark. "We need a good plan, and there needs to be enough of us. I want you to teach me how to build that program of yours, your algorithm to find keywords -- we'll never get enough people if we wait for them to to come to us."

She's good with math, good with computers; she can help out, same as the other kids; Eduardo counts everything in storage so Hogarth doesn't have to and Erica's spending more and more time in the barn workshop, in the dark room, so that Hogarth has things to sell. This whole place is built on bird bones; light, fragile, and so easily broken.

Mark nods and nods and nods, watching her without blinking.

Christy forces herself to slow her words down, to keep from tripping over them. She doesn't know where this certainty comes from, but she's twelve and she has a child's face and a young voice and she needs them to take her seriously about this. "But this place is a sanctuary. It needs to stay a sanctuary, because we're not going to want to be in the spotlight all the time. And I -- I just want my _mom."_

And to her complete horror, her throat closes up and her nose prickles and she can't say a thing.

Thankfully, in the next beat, Erica's there, wrapping her up in a hug, and then Hogarth and Dustin and Christopher come too, angling themselves around furled wings and each other, burying her in arms that hold her together, pressing her back into her own skin and bones, until she feels she can remain there, until it's just Mark and Eduardo, standing at the opposite ends of the dining room, not looking at each other.

 

-

 

That night, she wakes up at one in the morning with a nosebleed, and finds that the Kleenex box in their room is empty. Same in the bathroom, because everybody else had seemingly taken Christy's impromptu cleaning session as a promise that she'd always do it, which became a self-fulling prophecy, because she did or else it went undone.

Sighing to herself, she pulls the bathroom door shut behind her and heads out into the hall, one bloody hand pinching her nose shut. They keep the spare Kleenex boxes and toilet paper rolls in the garage.

She tracks through the dark living room, cutting through the dining room and descending the four steps that separate the kitchen from the new addition and the garage. She puts her hand on the doorknob, welcome mat gritty under her bare feet.

"-- what to do," she hears, and stops.

For a beat, nothing, and then Hogarth speaks again, talking lowly.

"Maryem," he says, just that, with something in his tone she can't even begin to identify, and Christy catches her breath. Then, "I'm not going to remember that. You should probably e-mail that to me, so I can prepare a speech. I can point at Iran and show this poor kid what happened the _last_ time somebody got it into their heads that winged people would be accepted living among the wingless."

Another pause, and Christy doesn't breathe, doesn't move, craning with every cell of her body, like that will help her hear Christopher's mother's voice.

"No, crushing his soul and hopes and dreams is _exactly_ what I want to do," Hogarth responds, dry as bone. "When Chris's wings come in, this kid -- Mark -- is going to be the only one I can rely upon to help me in the outside world. So I _need_ him to be reliable." 

Another pause.

And, "No, I can hear them. I'll let you go. Yeah, you too."

Nothing after that, and Christy waits, but there's no movement from Hogarth's bedroom. She imagines him just sitting there in the dark, staring at the phone in his hand, and quickly ducks into the garage to look for more Kleenex.

It's only when she cuts through the living room again that that she sees what she completely failed to spot on her way down: Mark and Eduardo are tangled together on the sofa, fast asleep.

She blinks, registering legs and wings and both of Eduardo's arms wrapped around Mark's shoulders, pressing him down into the cushions like not even his body weight, not even his arms are adequate for all the feeling he wants to imprint into Mark's bones. She sees the gleam of moonlight reflected off Mark's open eyes, visible underneath the careless flop of Eduardo's wings. She's never seen him hold anyone before, flinching away from elbows at mealtimes and remaining unresponsive in the face of hugs, but he's got his arms slung low around Eduardo's waist.

Christy meets his gaze and immediately looks away. She passes behind the sofa and takes the stairs as quietly as possible.

Eduardo loves, she decides. Just that. Eduardo loves.

 

-

 

The FBI agent doesn't come back, and Mark doesn't talk any more about the Winklevosses or the plan, but Hogarth's rage lasts a frighteningly long time nonetheless. The snow melts down the hills, piling up in gritty ridges. No new snow falls, and just as she's beginning to think he isn't _ever_ going to forgive Mark for jeopardizing their safety, Dustin gets caught trying to smuggle marijuana up to his room.

There's no way he could have procured it without Christopher, and suddenly, _they're_ the ones in the doghouse, getting yelled at and rostered for all the unpleasant chores, which is probably the point. Mark takes the hint and spends most of that week in his room, trying not to attract Hogarth's attention any more than necessary.

Christy sees the Ziploc baggie before Hogarth confiscates it ("what he do with it?" Erica asks her later, her eyes dancing, and Christy answers, "Dumped it in the compost heap. Can you imagine what's going to happen to the poor deer that eats it?" which leads to them staggering around like hoofstock on drugs for the next five minutes,) and can tell at a glance that it's not very good quality, and probably not something Dustin or Christopher would smoke even if they _were_ into weed.

"Oh, _please,"_ Dustin bursts out, about twenty minutes into Hogarth's dinnertime lecture about safety and responsibility and _what part of "marijuana is illegal" do you think not applies to you?_ "Like it's the _pot_ that's going to get us in trouble if the cops ever bust down our door." He gestures. "Erica's an illegal immigrant, the rest of us are on Amber Alert, and oh, right, we're _giant genetic mutants."_

"Dustin," Hogarth sighs, disappointed.

"Where even do you _find_ pot around here?" Eduardo asks admiringly, leaning around his soup bowl. "There's no way it grows anywhere on this coast unless you've got a greenhouse."

"I am a wealth of secrets, Wardo," Dustin responds solemnly.

 

-

 

At the beginning of April, an arts festival in Augusta leaves Christy, Erica, Mark, Eduardo, and Dustin are on their own for three days, as the Hughes pack up their truck and drive down to set up a booth with a dozen other local artists on the steps of the capitol building. They even take two or three of the larger pieces; scrap metal creations Christy's seen come together over the winter with aching, painful slowness.

Her favorite bears the abstract likeness of a man crouching, hands braced. To his back, Hogarth has attached an array of feathers: Dustin's sunshine yellow, Erica's speckled brown, Christy's blue-and-white, and Eduardo's deep ebony black, so that it looks like as the man tips forward into his descent, he's going to sprout wings and fly. She's torn, between hoping he sells it and hoping he doesn't, so that it comes back to them.

"Okay," Hogarth mutters distractedly, tripping down the steps on his bad knee. Christopher's sitting on the hood of the truck, looking patient. "I think that's it." He turns back to them, gathered around the white porch columns to say good-bye. "Does anyone need anything from the city?"

"Christy needs a bra!" Erica shouts gleefully, and, horrified, Christy yelps and covers her face with her hands.

Hogarth looks about as mortified as she feels. She can visibly _see_ him telling himself not to be weird about it, because there's nothing weird about female anatomy. "Right, of course," he says briskly. "Do you know what size?"

She's never worn a bra before. Wouldn't even bother with it, because it can't be straight-forward when she's got wings to work around, except for how the zip line is getting uncomfortable. 

"I don't --" 

"34B," Mark offers from the other end of the porch, sitting on the railing with his legs dangling out over the bushes, and he promptly turns bright red. "Just guessing," he goes, feebly.

"Um, um," Hogarth scans the upper story windows. "Okay, um, do you want, like, a pattern, or --"

Erica finally takes pity on him, since nobody else seems inclined to come to his rescue; Eduardo looks constipated with the effort it takes not to laugh, and Christopher's shaking silently. "We're just teasing you, Hogarth," she says. "We're just going to order them online. Have fun at the arts festival!"

 

-

 

The taillights of the truck haven't even disappeared around the bend of the highway before Dustin and Erica are whooping, yelling, diving back towards the house with a thunderclap of feathers. Eduardo and Mark follow, no less excited.

"Come on, come on!" Dustin shouts. "The weather's _perfect_ today!"

Christy trails after them, watching as they yank open the closet and start pushing aside cut-up winter coats and boots, pulling out what looks like climbing gear. "Where are we going? What are we doing?" she asks nervously, since this is obviously not something they do unless Hogarth's gone for a reliably long time, which probably means it's dangerous and likely to get them caught or photographed.

"You'll see!"

Within an hour of the Hughes' departure, the five of them are uphill through the woods, further than Christy's ever gone on her own before. The route is completely unfamiliar to her, but Dustin's in the lead and he seems to know exactly where he's going. The trees eventually give way to sparser brush and the cliffside, which makes Christy feel antsy and exposed. She looks around; they're all wearing windbreakers, and Mark's weighed down by what looks like a hundred feet of nylon rope, stakes tucked under the other arm, and Eduardo's got a pair of harnesses slung across his back like the kind Christy's seen rock climbers use, a half-dozen caribineers hooked into the loops of his jeans and jangling with each step.

They reach a vista that opens out into open sky and sea, where the screaming wind has bent the shrubs back into broke-back shapes. It is completely deserted. Far below and to the south, she sees the lighthouse and the distant cluster of houses around downtown Rockwell.

They have to shout to be heard.

"Keep your wings folded as tight as possible until we get everything grounded!" Erica yells to her, before running forward to help Mark and Eduardo find an anchor for the stakes. It's good advice; Christy can feel the wind tugging at her feathers, and can't imagine what it'd be like to be snatched up like paper debris and tossed out to sea.

She furls her wings as close to her body as she can and sidles over to Dustin. "What are we doing?" she tries again.

"Flying," Dustin murmurs, like his mouth is glued together with honey

His eyes are an excited, reverent burn, and she can't tell if the tremble of his feathers are him or the wind.

They hook Erica in first, anchoring her with three different lines driven deep into the rocky ground and fitting her into the harness, which she then clips to the ropes. She crouches low, at the very edge of the cliff, the flyaway hairs coming off her braid twisting in every direction. She looks ready to fall.

Gingerly, inch-by-inch, she starts to spread her wings.

The wind catches at them immediately, bending them back and making her hop a few steps. Then, like sails, her wings outstretch all the way and she's airborne, soaring up so quickly and canting so far to one side, wings angling desperately to compensate, that both Mark and Dustin jump on her line, pulling her in like a kite.

Christy watches, heart in her throat and cheeks chapped, as Erica rights herself and stays aloft, reeling out to the end of the line.

She looks like an angel.

"Do you want to go next?" she asks breathlessly, when she's done and they manage to pull her back to the ground without dropping her off the cliffside, which had to be a herculean feat considering Erica's dodgy depth perception.

"Oh, yes, please," Christy responds fervently.

It doesn't take much adjusting to switch them, getting Erica out of the harness and Christy in, tightening straps here and there. The wind at the edge whistles loudly in her ear. It's making her eyes water, and what Erica had made look so easy is ridiculously hard: it feels like every feather she has is pulling, threatening to knock her off balance and send her skittering down the cliff-face.

She shifts her heels with every pull, leaning into the headwind, and then, suddenly, her wings are half-cocked and she's no longer on the ground.

"Hold them still!" Erica yells, when Christy's first instinct is to flap, toes dragging in the dirt for a second before she's lifting off again, and after that, Christy couldn't do anything anyway, frozen with the sensation of watching the ground soar away from her. Far below, she sees the white-tipped froth of the sea crashing against the rocks, and soon, her friends are just little oval-shaped faces clustered below.

Her wings hold her steady. Her bones feel as if they're made of air.

She spreads out her arms and shouts to the sky.

 

-

 

She lands without breaking any bones or twisting her ankle or dying spectacularly, and Mark comes forward to help her out of the harness. Something in his expression makes her pause, and before she can second-guess herself, she calls Eduardo over.

"Do you still have the second harness?" she asks, darting her eyes at Mark.

He sees where she's going with that immediately, the same way he's only ever one step behind her when it comes to simplifying complex rational expressions, pencils scratching against their workbooks like they're in a race. "Yes," he says, and runs back to get it, letting the wind lift him up and carry him the last few steps.

"What are you --" Mark starts, but she cuts him off excitedly.

"Shhh!"

He figures it out as soon as Eduardo returns with the other harness and they start clipping in. "No way," he goes, eyes darting from one to the other. He backs away from the cliff edge. "No way, it's not going to work, we'd be too heavy."

"For one of us, sure," Eduardo answers, and tugs him closer. "That's why Christy and I are both going up with you."

It takes a lot of rearranging, and help from a curious Erica and Dustin, to even find a way to securely strap in three people to their rigging, but they wind up with Eduardo and Christy in the harnesses, Eduardo in the back and Christy in the middle, wings outspread in a formation like a dragonfly, with Mark strapped to her front. There's only so much rope, so they probably won't be able to go up that high, but that's probably a good thing anyway.

"Come on," she says to the back of Mark's neck as, on three, she and Eduardo start to extend their wings. "I think it's time you learned to fly."

 

-

 

A doe and her two white-speckled fawns pick around the edges of the compost heap, while Christy crouches by the drain pipe and watches, motionless, when the fire alarm sounds in an ear-splitting burst, sending Christy's skeleton jumping out of her skin and the deer scattering back into the woods.

Fire alarm means an intruder coming up the drive, and Christy flings herself for the safety of the house. It's a fantastically gorgeous spring day, the way you can only really appreciate after three months of interminable winter, and her new plumage coming in, glossy blue and black and white like a jaybird's. Molting has made everyone in the house a little irritable; even the ones who don't have feathers to molt.

She has to dance up on her tiptoes to reach the cord on the garage door, yanking it shut and plunging her into windowless gloom. The fire alarm cuts out.

Hogarth pokes his head out of the master bath when she comes in, one half of his face slathered in shaving cream.

"Who is it?" he asks, and it's a largely rhetorical question, considering there's no way Christy could know. "Do we have to pretend nobody's home?"

"I'll find out."

She joins the others in the living room, all of them crouching in a makeshift dogpile below the window with the perfect view of the drive, elbowing each other for room. She hears the purring rumble of an approaching engine; not the diesel-fed roar of Hogarth's truck -- which is in the garage -- but definitely the sound of an engine that's cared for, or else is brand new. She can't see anything. Christopher keeps accidentally jabbing her every time he cranes his arm behind him to scratch at some point on his back; he's been particularly itchy ever since breakfast.

She watches his fingernail dig in, absently scratching, and frowns.

"Hey --" she starts, but Eduardo's whisper cuts over her.

"What do you think?" he wants to know. His shirt today is jewel-toned, a bright cyan blue, the buttons pearly white. "Tourists?"

"Jehovah's witness," Dustin bets, gleeful. "Should we tell them we're angels of the Lord, thou shalt not return to this place, so sayeth the Lord?"

"Dustin ..." Mark begins, but then he twitches the curtain aside to peek, and his words trail off.

He shoves out from underneath their dogpile, scrambling to his feet and flinging himself out of the room so fast they don't have time to react, much less stop him. She hears his footsteps thundering down the hall, the front door opening, and pushes herself up to peer through the curtain herself.

A classic red Pontiac Bonneville with Massachusetts plates sits in the driveway.

Her heart trips over itself and forgets to beat for the space of one airless, timeless second, before it starts again, hammering as hard as wingbeats against her ribs. Without conscious direction from her brain, she gets to her feet and chases after Mark.

" _Christy!"_ Erica yelps out in warning, but it's too late: she goes barreling out through the front door.

The car doors are open.

Sean's standing on the driver's side, arms hooked over the top of the door frame, a smile quirking in the corner of his mouth.

Gone are the doorag and the basketball shorts and the fake gold chain -- he's got on thick-framed black glasses and a grandfather cardigan the color of wine. His hair's loose, sun-lightened, and he's wearing Toms with peeling soles, one foot crossed over the other. Trading one costume for another. When he sees Christy, he straightens up suddenly, surprise and joy lifting every feature on his face. He salutes in hello, and she feels the answering pull of it in her body, warmth spreading to her toes.

"Sean," she says.

And spreads her wings as wide as they'll go, because her heart can't contain it, otherwise.

In the space between them, Mark's got his arms around a girl with hair as sandy-curly as his own, crushing her face to his, hugging and kissing and rocking each other back and forth. The noises they make are wordless, delighted, utterly shameless in their reunion, and Christy pretends she can't see the tears falling thickly and fast down Mark's face, across his chin.

She's Christy's age, wearing a denim jacket with strips cut into the back to make room for a pair of fledgling wings with the fluffy white down still on.

Two younger girls climb out of the backseat. Each of them have Mark's curly hair and sharp, angular features, and when he sees them, he shouts and goes to his knees, dragging the oldest sister with him and opening his arms. The four of them become a tangle.

Hogarth steps up beside her on the porch, and she glances at him sidelong.

He's smiling, eyes crinkled up in a helpless, happy way, but there's a tension to his mouth that she can't stop herself from seeing. He's thinking about three more faces the police will be looking for, three more mouths to feed, but right now, Christy is twelve (almost thirteen!) and she doesn't want to worry about those adult things. Let Hogarth do that. Right now, Sean is here. Right now, Mark has his sisters and his sister has her wings.

She wraps her arms around herself, trying to hold on to this happy, buoying sensation for as long as it lasts; like helium in her lungs, like the weightlessness of flight.

 

-

fin


End file.
